Painting the Medium is modifying the presentation of a story in order to convey information about the story. A comic book might give a character special-looking Speech Bubbles that reflect on their personality. A TV show might change to black-and-white or sepia-tone during flashbacks. A video game might change its GUI to show a change in the player character or the setting.

This is typically done for one of several reasons:

To imply something about a character or scene without actually stating it. If done well, this will blend naturally into the rest of the work in a way the viewer or reader barely notices, and its meaning will be clear.

To create a intentional jarringly Off Model section of a work to demonstrate that something outside the norm is happening. An Eldritch Abomination may be drawn in a different art style to symbolize that it is an "intruder from another reality", for instance.

Some of the most popular variants have become so conventional that we stop noticing them completely — for example, dialogue written in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS is shouted. Heck, even we do it (check the entries in Self-Demonstrating Article why not?)

By Painting The Medium, a creator turns a transparent tool — meant to show the work behind it — into a part of the work.

See also Rule of Perception. Unless the characters themselves remark or interact with the audio or visual effects, then it can't be concluded they occur within the setting, so they must only be presented to the audience's side of the fourth wall. The characters who do remark on these tropes may be uncommonly Medium Aware, or they may know that their particular universe is governed by metafictional laws, in which case the 'paint' isn't just on the medium, it's integrated into the text.

Please note: This trope is not 'Character interacts with the pages of the book/panels of the comic/film camera/suitable alternative for their story' - that trope is Medium Awareness. This trope is 'The setup, layout or presentation of the book/comic/film/whatever is changed to reflect a change in the characters' situation'. Please don't put incorrect examples on pages they shouldn't be on, thank you. Splatter on the camera lens may be acceptable as a way of showing just how much rain/blood/liquid is flying around the scene at that point.

Examples:

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Advertising

Axe launched a series of ads for Axe Rise which are shot from a fake first-person perspective, from the point of view of a young man. He walks into a restaurant, and meets an attractive waitress, who recognizes him from "that party last week, remember?" And a caption pops up, asking the viewer what name was on her name tag, which she is now accidentally covering. Another commercial, shot later on in the same diner, involves her inviting the man to a party and giving him her address and the time. He's distracted by an attractive woman at the next table, and the waitress says she has to go. "What," asks the caption "was her address?" A third involves said young man putting on a shirt and meeting another pretty girl and her five friends, all of whom she introduces by name before they leave. One of them, clearly interested, stays behind to talk to him. "What was her name?" These commercials work because the next time the viewer sees them, they are actually paying attention, just like the product is supposed to help you do.

A commercial on British radio starts out advertising, say, a kitchen sale, until the voice actor suddenly collapses on-air; their co-star or producer freaks out and starts shouting for help. The real point of the commercial is to encourage people to get first-aid training.

Similarly, there's the ACC PSA's in New Zealand, which start off as normal commercials before the spokesperson trips on something or other.

A Duracell sports match commercial features the TV scoreboard running out of power and having the batteries replaced.

There was an entire series of Energizer commercials which would appear to be ads for something else until interrupted by the Bunny. One was supposedly for long distance phone service, featuring a split screen—until the Bunny knocked over the divider, leaving the two actors from the original commercial staring at each other.

Although most fake-ad Energizer Bunny commercials were parodies with fake brand names, one ad used the opening to ABC's Wide World of Sports more-or-less as-is—sports-clip montage, Jim McKay's "Spanning the globe" voice-over, the works. It ran one year during ABC's coverage of the World Series, making it look even more real. Everything looked normal through the first second or two of the "Agony Of Defeat" clip, before the ski jumper loses control. Then cut to a "close-up" of the Bunny booming away, apparently walking across the ramp. Then cut back to the jumper wiping out...

Carling's Black Label (beer) did the same sort of thing.

A radio commercial has the voice actor breaking into the "next" commercial to mention a sale, leaving the second actor spluttering "She can't do that, can she?"

Here's a Bounce commercial invaded by an overenthusiastic Old Spice commercial. (Both brands are owned by Procter & Gamble.)

A Geico commercial set in the Old West ends with the cowboy riding off into the sunset as 'THE END' fades into view... and he hits his head on the letters and falls off his horse.

Anime and Manga

General: In manga, when there is a character who almost exclusively uses katakana in his or her speech, you want to pay close attention to him or her. Chance is that character either has strange accent, speaks with improper tone, or crazy.

In the first issues of the Dragon Ball manga, Goku delivers a Megaton Punch to Yamcha, hard enough to send him flying, at which point he crashes into the top of the panel, shatters it, and bounces off.

Similar gags showed up from time to time in Akira Toriyama's earlier Dr. Slump.

In Hellsing, dream sequences end themselves by panes getting smaller and smaller until they're pinprick-sized, as the dreams go weird before the character wakes up.

Many Fan Subs play with the subtitles at least a little for various effects, though this can distract the audience from what's happening on screen.

Played by Order, a Fan Sub group, in their release of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: every time Simon and Kamina are Calling Their Attacks, their subtitles get a different font as well as karaoke-like highlights. Also, when someone emphasizes the end of a phrase, the beginning appears first and then the emphasized part appears, and when they're yelling, you can see the words shaking.

Similarly, Arienai Fansubs's release of Futari wa Pretty Cure had some of the karaoke lyrics in the opening credits mimic the motion of objects onscreen, sliding across the screen or spiraling off into the distance.

A pioneer in these effects was Kaizoku Fansubs with their One Piece sub-work. Each character got an elaborate font for calling out their attacks, and sometimes different ways for the letters to appear. It's a bit over-the-top, but then again it's One Piece.

A somewhat humorous one is done in a fansub of GaoGaiGar. A certain energy source that greatly boosts the power of any mecha (potentially, anything at all) with mostly unknown origins goes by the name THE POWER. Whenever a character mentions this, the only subtitles that would show on the screen would say THE POWER! in gigantic orange letters (the color someone or something becomes when infused with it).

In the first episode of Princess Princess, Akira jokes that the school is from another dimension, whereupon Tooru pictures the background changing to a picture of space. Akira comments that he said another dimension, not space, and Tooru changes the background so it's all swirly. He asks if thats better, Akira says yes and they continue on with the story.

In the second volume of Return To Labyrinth, Mizumi "steals" the speech bubbles of Mayor Spittledrum, rearranging them to say something entirely different.

In Gunsmith Cats, one of the protagonists is wearing ear protection while shooting. She and the audience can barely hear what an another character is saying until she takes them off.

Interestingly, One Piece has an example here. The so-called "Levels" of Impel Down are written with Roman letters by Oda himself, katakana spelling shown above, and are also written with Roman letters when the characters mention them. However, in Luffy's speech bubbles, they're written purely with katakana. The reason for this is unknown, but might be related to Luffy's rather childish speech pattern.

In One-Punch Man, Saitama's face is usually drawn in a very basic style, as if to give the impression that he's so lazy the artist couldn't be arsed to finish drawing him. He gains an Art Shift to the detailed style of the rest of the cast on the rare occasion that he takes something seriously.

"Tornado of Terror" Tatsumaki is usually drawn in the detailed style the rest of the cast get, but occasionally she'll revert to a ONE-esque doodle.

The second, remade Tokyopop translation of the Magic Knight Rayearth manga features a different font for each kind of character.

Every speech bubble to be connected to Ichiya in Fairy Tail is full of sparkles.

At one point during the video of Bo Burnham's live show what., he starts to make an insulting joke about video editors, only to be suddenly cut off by a mysterious Jump Cut.

In the vinyl album version of the Monty Python sketch The Piranha Brothers, the voice-over announcer for the skit is being menaced by one of Dinsdale's thugs, and told that the sketch has gone on too long. When he protests, the thug "scratches the record", ending the bit. We fade out to: "Aw! Sorry, squire! I've scratched the record —orry, squire! I've scratched the record! —" over and over. Infinitely, as this part ran on an actual loop on the LP.

Cheech and Chong's self-titled first album features Tommy Chong attempting to put a vinyl record (supposedly the very one this skit is on) on the phonograph and failing miserably, the skit (and this side) ending in a fluster of wild record needle scratching.

The first of Stan Freberg's Dragnetaffectionate parodies, St. George and the Dragonet, opens with this disclaimer: "The legend you are about to hear is true. Only the needle should be changed to protect the record."

In Robin Williams's Weapons of Self Destruction special, he tells a story about Dock Ellis's no-hitter game while on LSD. While he tells it, the camera blurs the screen and adds motion trails and other hazy effects.

Comic Books

Speech Bubbles are a ridiculously common way to do this; see entry for examples.

One trick that's been used in a number of comics is to have pages printed sideways to indicate a change of state or perception.

In The Sandman, it's used at one point when a character falls asleep and moves from the real world to the world of dreams.

Also, Dream's speech bubbles are white-on-black rather than black-on-white, and have irregular borders. When another character tries to imitate Dream's voice, his speech bubbles change color, too.

The same applies to other important characters, especially the Endless. For example, Delirium's speech bubbles are colourful and the font is a little... unusual, and Desire speaks in a very pretty, sharp-edged font. Only Death's font and speech bubbles are normal. Among the other characters, there are Matthew the Raven's orange speech bubbles and thin, "sticky" font, Bast's faux-Egyptian font and angels' beautiful cursive.

In fact, in the scene where various gods and other entities turn up to discuss what to do with the now-leaderless Hell, each of the characters involved has a unique and thematically appropriate font and bubble style.

In Swamp Thing, it was used when the eponymous plant-creature and his wife make love through the use of hallucinogenic tubers. No, really.

Dave Sim seems quite fond of this trope — creative lettering and speech bubbles, the use of separated text and illustrations to depict Cerebus drifting through the astral plane-like Spheres in the "Mind Game" stories, and one issue where the orientation of the panels spins every page to emphasize the protagonist's vertigo.

Also, Frank Quitely's 3-issue art duties on Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin, frequently blended sound effects into the scene. Explosions in the shape of "BOOOOM" and when Damian gets smashed into a wall, the cracks spell out "smash", etc.

In Y: The Last Man's Safeword arc, Yorick is drugged with hallucinogens, and the structure of the page breaks up, with the panels placed at odd angles and overlapping. The white-on-black title cards (which normally carry objective information like "Tel Aviv, Israel, Three Days Later") show things like "Where The Hell Am I?"

An even earlier use of this was the surreal Krazy Kat, done by George Herriman. At times, the characters would draw various props themselves, and one Sunday sequence emphasising words that end in '-tion' ends with Officer Pupp hauling Ignatz to... an incomplete panel. Pupp asks Herriman if he's got 'kartoonist's kramp', while Ignatz muses on 'sweet procrastination'.

In the Astérix stories, different fonts are used to show languages that cannot be understood by the main characters (or at least notable accents). Most obvious are the Goths, who are written in blackletter, and Egyptians, who speak entirely in hieroglyphs (that are subtitled for the reader's benefit).

In one panel of Asterix and the Secret Weapon, Obelix is doubled over with hysterical laughter, and the panel stretches out due to his body pushing the frame.

Other frame-using examples include Asterix leaning onto the frame for support, his hand and elbow going out of the frame. There's absolutely no wall in this place.

At the beginning of Asterix and Cleopatra, which depicts a dialogue between two Egyptian characters, a footnote indicates that the scene will be dubbed for the reader's convenience, and goes to explain that the movement of characters' lips doesn't fit the pronunciation of the words because dubbing techniques of the time were not sophisticated enough.

At one point, Obelix attempts to speak Egyptian. Since Egyptian is represented by hieroglyphics, his faltering efforts look like a child's drawings.

In Asterix and the Great Crossing, Asterix and Obelix go to sea and a storm blows them to America, where they meet some Scandinavians, and måybe yøu cån guess høw their långuåge is treåted. Asterix tries to talk with them but gets nowhere, and muses that he must not be putting his ˚s and /s in the right places. The Scandinavians have a Gåulish slåve with å "hørrible åccent": his slashes are backward and his rings are rectangular.

In Superman: Secret Identity, almost the entire narration is formatted as if it were written on a typewriter. In the last scene, Clark makes note that the aforementioned machine finally gave out and that he's finishing his autobiography on a computer, something exemplified by the change of narration bubble format.

Mighty Avengers #9 has several characters accidentally yanked back in time; this is shown by printing everything but the word bubbles and captions in a faux-CMYK halftone style, like the comics of the time they were transported to. In the next issue, it goes even further by adding the era's introductory caption, tiny ads at the bottom of pages, and so on.

Rising Stars contains a truly rare and brilliant use of the comic medium. As the protagonists leave a character who has become a hermit because he is plagued by seeing the dead, they comment on how he will be alone when they leave. The last panel is a full right-hand page of him muttering that he'll "never be alone" while huddling in a chair. It's all normal until the reader starts to turn the page and light illuminates it from behind, causing the next page to show through and outline a host of dead people and their speech bubbles clustered all around the huddled man on the chair. The entire next page is just a white space with reversed images of people and text to bleed onto the previous page.

In the Sin City comic Hell And Back, the protagonist is injected with a powerful hallucinogen. At this point, the normally black and white format switches to brilliant color until the hallucinations are cured.

Maus is a story of German Jews in World War II; it depicts Germans as cats and Jews as mice, then does an extensive Deconstruction of the depiction as overly crude. At one point, the narrator enters a house which was "completely overrun by cats and dogs," and then adds, "Am I allowed to say that, or does it completely louse up the metaphor?" (The humans, at that point, were depicted as humans wearing the appropriate masks.)

Jim Steranko was fond of this; one issue he did had Nick Fury making his way through a booby-trapped facility. The page was laid out like a maze, requiring the reader to solve it in order to read. The panels weren't even oriented to each other, which reflected Fury's disorientation.

In a short sci-fi story appearing in the Swedish edition of The Phantom, a group of humans are attempting to subvert an alien world so they can seize control. The only thing the aliens care about is The Thinker, a heralded being who, according to their faith, thinks the universe into existence; the humans reason that if they can sedate The Thinker with a stunner, they will reveal him as a fraud, and the resulting chaos from the revelation will make the planet easy for conquest. They succeed in the assault... and the following two pages are filled with empty frames. In the last page immediately after, The Thinker wakes up again, realizes he's forgotten what he thought about, and thinks about something else.

In Vögelein, every character has his or her own font. These give some indication of personality or role in the story — Heinrich, dead for two hundred years, has a nostalgically old-fashioned font. Vogelein herself has a tiny, wispy text. The Duskie's is Sand and comes with a Phonetic Accent.

Zot! features an issue dealing with Terry's lesbian urges and her dilemma of whether to confess her feelings to Pam, an open (and widely mocked) lesbian. The final page features Pam greeting Terry, only for her to shamefully walk away. Next comes a page of letters to the writer, or if you're reading the trade paperback, author commentary. Flip the page, and you see the real last page, where Terry changes her mind and rushes back down the hallway to say 'Hi' to Pam.

Deadpool was also the only character who thought and spoke in yellow boxes or balloons, when everyone else used normal white. Now major characters like Iron Man and Spider-Man have started having their own distinct boxes and bubbles.

And when Deadpool starts having conversations with himself in internal monologue, he uses his trademark yellow boxes while the "other party" uses white boxes with typewriter-stype text.

In the Daniel Way series Deadpool seems to have developed a sort of internal multiple personality disorder. Each of his personalities thinks in a different font and colour.

I'm a Marvel... and I'm a DC naturally has some fun with this when Deadpool shows up: he ponders in yellow captions how bad the stop motion animation is and asks for a better editing software.

A Secret Six story had the team vomiting after being poisoned by Cheshire. Deadshot is shown vomiting, with only his narration boxes, until he pulls a butler by the collar and asks if he heard what he just said. The butler says no, and Deadshot says "Good. I thought that narration was out loud."

Specking of Secret Six, Ragdoll has a different italic front than everyone else.

One of the many Marvel Crossovers, The Infinity Crusade, has the main villain wanting to kill everything so no more evil happens. This involves all realities. Including ours. One panel has its own page on it, indicating the point of view of the actual reader. Then, all dimensions catch on fire. Again, the very comic book is shown, along with the reader and it all bursts into flames. Ouch. But there's hope. Turns out it was all an illusion to fool the villain. Everyone in all realities, including the reader, is said to have resisted burning to death with their mind.

Many issues of The Spirit have the title of the story drawn into the panel. For example, the negative space created by cacti and nearby characters form the title.

Watchmen has a few examples. Issue 5, aptly titled "Fearful Symmetry": the panel layout and the locations featured therein are completely symmetrical from beginning to end. A much more subtle example is Dr. Manhattan's unconventional perception of time. Manhattan believes that all of time exists simultaneously and people only perceive it as one moment at a time. Keen-eyed readers will note that all of the past and future events that he mentions throughout the book are things that appear in other panels, and the only time he ever uses the word "maybe" or shows any semblance of free will at all is when discussing his plans for the future that takes place after the end of the book.

Rorschach's speech bubbles are raggedy-edged, and he never uses bold or italics. None of this applied until the Blaire Roche case.

Zonic the Zone cop comes from a "perpendicular" world; he's always shown floating sideways, sometimes with his feet resting on the side of the panel.

One story from Zonic's perspective printed entirely on a 90° axis from normal.

In issue 50 when the Ultimate Annihilator fires and seemingly consumes Sonic and Dr. Robotnik the color instantly drains from the page to show how everything is being utterly destroyed. The next page is almost entirely blank until a panel border and Sonic's hand appear at the bottom to show that Sonic survived.

In one issue a bunch of continuity callbacks and references in one scene causes the Clue from Ed. to grow increasingly disoriented as it has to keep popping up to inform the reader of when things happened.

In issue 252 Sonic alludes to events that have been retconned away (he's the only one who remembers they happened) a Clue from Ed. comes up like usual to tell the reader when it happened only to say "STH#... wait a minute...".

At the end of the Legion of 3 WorldsFinal Crisis tie-in, Superboy-Prime literally punches himself out of continuity. As he does so, he's reduced to inks, then pencils, then a rough layout sketch, and then nothingness. He then appears back on Earth-Prime, our Earth, where his family now fears him because they've followed his exploits in The DCU. In the end, he ends up on the official DC forums, just like the whiny, ever complainingfanboy he's been reimagined to represent.

One of the Judge Dredd stories in prog 2010 is told in two parts, with the second part set in 2131 and the first in 2098. The first part is done in the style of an 80s story — black and white artwork, a more cartoony art style, campier storytelling, an old-fashioned Lawgiver, and even 80s-style credits. The second part was similar to the contemporary strips.

Batwoman villain Alice speaks with black speech bubbles and white text just to reinforce how crazy she is. The only time she uses a normal speech bubble is her last line before falling off a plane into the river: "You have our father's eyes".

In the Batman Graphic Novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, all of the patients have different speech bubbles to indicate their personalities, the sounds of their voices, etc. For example, Clayface has muddy, goopy-looking speech bubbles and font, and the Joker has no bubbles at all, opting instead for a single line pointing to some red, scrawled text. The Dark Knight himself also has special speech bubbles - white-on-black, with a gritty-looking font.

In the mainstream Batman comics some artists do this with Two-Face to denote which of his two personalities is speaking at the time. They tend to give Harvey normal bubbles and Two-Face either white-on-black, some other color on black, or bubbles with gritty font on an abnormal color.

In the Brian Li Sung arc of Grendel, the margin of each page contains an excerpt from Brian's personal journal. At first it appears that only half the pages contain narrative, while the other half are just doodles, but over time the doodles are joined by scrawled phrases in a different handwriting. They're actually the handiwork of the "Grendel" in Brian, which had been taking control of his left hand while he'd been consciously making notes with his right.

DC's magician Zatanna Zatara casts her spells by speaking them backwards. In issue 23 of Countdown to Final Crisis we meet her Earth-3 counterpart, Annataz Arataz, who speaks them upside-down. How this sounds to the other characters in the story is not explained.

Meta GuyAmbush Bug can see speech bubbles, and asks her why the words in hers are backwards. She runs away crying.

In Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, the frame is sometimes made up of words, right-side up or otherwise. Fun to see what words are in there and you can miss some if you don't rotate the book. Also, the Happy Noodle Boy frames have smiley/frowny faces, words, or scribbles between them.

Continued in the second (and far more catastrophic) crossover between the two universes, Secret Wars (2015), which has each character speaking in all caps or properly capitalized depending on their universe of origin, even after finding themselves on Battleworld.

Later in All-New, All-Different Marvel Miles and supporting cast (who got properly integrated in the new world by Molecule Man, long story, being nice to the nigh omnipotent being pays) get the Marvel universe all caps, other refugees from Ultimate Marvel however keep their original proper capitalization (like the Maker in New Avengers (2015)).

Matt Fraction's Sex Criminals does this in issue #3; the protagonist Suzie (who can freeze timewhen she orgasms) belts out a rousing chorus of "Fat-Bottom Girls" by Queen. While she sings, all of her speech balloons are covered over with yellow sticky-note squares containing a statement from Matt Fraction explaining that they wanted to include this scene due to their respect for Freddie Mercury, but were not able to contact Brian May to get the rights for the song, so they had to blank out the lyrics.

French comic artist Marc-Antoine Mathieu loves this trope. To name just one example, "L'Origine" has a physical hole somewhere in the comic, and the figures react to the effects (CallBack, Foreshadowing) it causes.

Speaking of holes, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" has eaten holes into this children comic.

Red Handed has a lot of this, some of which is due to Matt Kindt having a deliberately sketchy drawing style, as in the blue non-photo pencils left visible in some panels. In addition the book has parts of its story told in newspaper headlines and photos, comic strips within the story, and book covers.

In Warren Ellis' run on Stormwatch, newly-joined team member Jenny Sparks tells her nearly century-long life story. Each era she lives through is drawn in the style of a comic strip or comic book of the time.

Comic Strips

Bloom County was also fond of this: for instance, on one occasion a dangling participle fell out of its speech bubble and whacked the speaker in the head.

Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson occasionally used different fonts in word balloons, most frequently when the bully Moe was speaking (in crudely lettered lowercase, suggesting brutishness and stupidity).

Dilbert once receives a convict serving prison time into his home. The prisoner complains about how cramped it is in Dilbert's house. The speech balloon of the prisoners complaint in this panel obscures Dilbert from view.

In Doonesbury, Dan Quayle's word balloons frequently contained spelling errors, a reference to the infamous incident wherein he told school children that "potato" was spelled "potatoe".

FoxTrot by Bill Amend is somewhat fond of this too. One comic had Peter sitting in a chair, and his mother, Andy, apparently chewing him out. Oddly, her speech bubbles had tiny, unreadable text, despite the bubbles being normal size. The last panel is Andy ripping off his previously hidden earphones. "—and take off those stupid headphones!"

One strip had Jason walking around and showing people how good he was at juggling knives. Everyone seems oddly unimpressed by this feat, and it isn't until the last panel that we see he isn't juggling at all. The knives have been taped to a piece of plexiglass, which he is just carrying around. Obvious to everyone in-universe, who would note that the knives aren't moving, but surprising to us.

ThisFrazz strip, in which the title character is literally painting the medium.

Pearls Before Swine is very fond of this. One Sunday comic strip featured Pig running to the end of the panel causing the color to go entirely off-base. Another series had the characters actually sit on top if their own panels.

The adult male crocodiles also speak in mixed-case letters, while the smarter (female and child) crocodiles speak in capital letters.

Don't forget this classic, where the falling copyright letters interrupt Pig's reply to Rat and prompts the latter to quip "That's one for the blooper reel."

One of the earlier uses of this was in 1950s strip Pogo, which had one regular who spoke in gothic type to indicate his pomposity. Guests also often had their own font styles. Note that not only did Pogonot use computer fonts, it wasn't typeset, either. Those baroque, elaborate word balloons were lettered by hand, because Walt Kelly (or his assistant Henry Shikuma) was Crazy Awesome.

Sweet Tooth: Jeff Lemire was very fond of experimenting in various issues, including telling two simultaneous stories, which were separated by one story not having any dialogue while the other did, making a storybook type issue by not having any speech bubbles and having the issue presented sideways, and changing his art style to indicate dream sequences.

Phoebe and Her Unicorn: Marigold can tell Phoebe's not pronouncing "The Shield of Boringness" in a properly dramatic fashion because of the font being used.

In Black Queen, Red King, when Rex telepathically thinks to Chrysalis, it's written in orange. When she replies, it's written in green. Also, certain words that describe Rex and Chrysalis's souls have Zalgo text, like this: t҉̻̙ḛ͈̩̫͚n̠̭͍̗̫d̤̬͍͇̲͝ͅr̘̯͠i͝ļs̞̤̜͓.

Whenever there's a "Freaky Friday" Flip, players tend to switch their avatars to that of the normal player of that character.

The use of music IRP to affect the mood of posts.

The Terrifying Presence Auric power is signified by the use of eviltext IRP.

Heart of Gold super empathy is signified by the use of gold text.

Thoughts, whether telepathic or otherwise, are often signified by the use of italics.

Brackets are used to signify Monese, except in the PMD universes where everyone speaks it, save for PMD-B when the brackets come back for interaction with humans.

Glitchmons tend to use an intentionally glitchy font when speaking.

Paper Mario: The Land of Harmony provides an interesting example: the story is written as if it were a Wii U gamenote Pinkie Pie flat-out says that it is a Wii U game in the first interlude, so characters in-story refer to things such as a gamepad and DLC, after the intro scene (reminiscent of Past Sins) a save file is created, after each chapter a save screen shows up, every now and again a multiple-choice screen appears, etc.

The Due South fanfic Scrabble has the story divided into two-to-three columns, representing the two narrators and, occasionally, the scrabble board they were playing with.

The Firefly fanfic Forward invokes this when covering scenes from River's perspective to portray her chaotic and jumbled thoughts. Text is centered instead of left aligned, and a seemingly random mixure of italics, bolds, capitalizations, and underlinings are used. Coupled with a stream-of-consciousness narration that is liberally sprinkled with non sequiturs, random thoughts, and the sheer jumbled confusion that is River's brain, it makes for a very surreal and effective read.

Films — Animation

Here's a really meta one: the early Disney Winnie the Pooh shorts were played out as readings of the books, down to the animated characters being able to walk on the text, a hurried page-turning at one point to keep Pooh from flying out of the book, and so forth. Thus it played with the concept that it was a book, when in fact it wasn't. All this in a cartoon for children.

At the end of The Thief and the Cobbler, the Thief comes out and takes the letters from the THE END title. Then he goes and takes the very film he is on out of the projector as it is rolling, rolls it up and runs off into the now blank screen. Gives new meaning to the term "scene stealer".

In Disney's Brother Bear, when Kenai is transformed, the movie changes its aspect ratio to subtly tell the viewer that he's seeing through different eyes now.

In The Emperor's New Groove, Kuzco-the-narrator freezes the frame and literally paints on the screen to bring the story back to himself. He then continues to interrupt the story so it focuses on himself. Later on in the story, Kuzco-the-character yells at Kuzco-the-narrator to stop talking and leave him alone. From then on, the movie is un-narrated.

In one scene, Ratatouille uses splashes of color to convey the indescribable qualities of tastes that harmonize well, and the differences in taste perception by Rémy and his brother.

Films — Live-Action

Casino features a rather unique example. The characters of Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) provide offscreen narration throughout the movie. In one scene Santoro is narrating the action when his voice is interrupted—permanently—by a baseball bat upside the head onscreen.

Includes a few frames of male genitalia to suggest that Tyler or another member of Project Mayhem is serving as the film's projectionist.

There are a few flashes of Tyler before he's introduced, possibly inserted into the film stock by the projectionist.

Tyler points to the "cigarette burn" on the film stock while the narrator explains how Tyler tampers with films.

In one of the first scenes, Tyler asks the narrator if he has anything to say, and the narrator says "I can't think of anything." At the end, we come back to this scene, but the narrator says "I still can't think of anything." Tyler replies "Ah, flashback humor."

While Tyler delivers his "You are not your job" monologue, his intensity causes the film stock to vibrate in the projector, allowing its perforations to become visible at the edges of the screen.

The English sub of Night Watch does this with subtitles: various characters' subtitles are in different colors, and when a character shouts, his subtitles get bigger.

A particularly cool effect from Night Watch is the depiction of The Call, an ability that vampires have to call victims to themselves. This is rendered as a character getting a bloody nose in a swimming pool, and the floating blood forming the subtitles of the vampire calling her prey. When she finishes speaking, the bloody subtitles dissipate, then coalesce into her next line of dialogue.

Planet Terror has all sorts of old-fashioned movie theater effects within the normal footage: a missing reel, jumping scenes, burned film, and so on. Most of them are used as Relax-o-Vision.

Death Proof had a few scratches and another missing reel, although it was "found" for the DVD release. To make up for this, the DVD had a scene (not included in the theatrical cut) that was entirely in black and white, before fading back.

The theatrical release of Grindhouse as a double feature had, sandwiched between the two main films, ads for a fictitious Mexican restaurant and mock movie trailers for "Coming Attractions".

At one point in a film titled The Impostors, one of the lead characters overhears a plot to blow up the ship in a foreign language. He hides under the bed, and understands the plan by reading the subtitles that were meant for the audience. And they pull it off without breaking the willing suspension of disbelief.

And in Austin Powers in Goldmember, involving talking to a Japanese man and Austin reading the subtitles, made even funnier by strategically placed objects blocking the subtitles and turning innocent words into swears ("Please eat some Shittake mushrooms")

In the Russian comedy High Security Vacation, the opening credits initially pan over Japanese-esque drawings, starting as Japanese characters and then morphing into Russian letters stylized into Japanese characters. Then, as the camera moves through the prison where the protagonists are detained, the credits blend seamlessly into the scenery, appearing as writings on walls, trucks, and other objects.

During a very frantic and drug-addled day in Goodfellas the editing and camera work shifts from the usual pacing to an equally frantic and excited style, mimicing the character's drug use.

In Robin Hood: Men in Tights, the opening scenes have the credits spelled out in flaming scenery lit by arrows. The villagers are understandably distressed by this and one remarks, "Every time they make a Robin Hood movie, they go and burn our village down!"

In Metropolis, on-screen text about an underground city of the poor scrolls down. Text about the skyscrapers of the rich scrolls up, and is shaped like a tower. In a story sequence, the text shines and bleeds.

In the 3DMovie version of TRON: Legacy, the Grid is a 3D world, obviously, but scenes in the real world are filmed in 2D.

District 9 seems to love splattering the camera with blood every time someone gets shot. Sometimes justified in that portions of the film are in mockumentary form, using footage that was recorded in-universe.

In Apollo 13, astronaut Fred Haise pukes in a bag once they've left gravity, and some of it splats on the camera.

There's a lot of this in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Sound effects are written on-screen, musical instruments give off waves of sound (only some of which are meant to actually affect the characters); a lot of video game visuals are also here, i.e. Gideon has a life bar during his boss battle, etc.

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare had a segment of the film (in a dream) filmed in 3D. When the audience is supposed to don their 3D glasses, the character entering the dream actually puts on a pair herself; it is explained that while the glasses mean nothing in the real world, in the dream they "can be whatever you want them to be", and allow her to navigate Freddy's mind. The glasses vanish once she puts them on, and reappear at the end of the film, when the 3D is over.

The film Brainstorm has the memory playback sequences show in a 2.2:1 ratio instead of the conventional 1.7:1 ratio of the rest of the movie. This was not entirely intentional as MGM backed out of making the whole film in a new 60fps, 2.2:1 format called Showscan. So the director filmed just memory blackback sequences in 2.2:1.

The famous score of Inception was based on taking the Edith Piaf song "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" (AKA the song the characters use to prepare themselves to wake up), and slowing it down to various speeds. Remember that the deeper into the dreams you go, the slower the outside world passes, so to the characters themselves, the song would sound distorted and slowed down.

The majority of Woody Allen'sZelig was filmed using cameras that date back to the period the film is set in. Simulated damage made the footage look old.

Literature

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes is written as a diary by Charlie, the main character, and his grammar and vocabulary weaken or expand in tandem with his intelligence and schooling.

This is kind of the whole point of Finnegans Wake. Joyce does it quite a bit in Ulysses as well, and to a lesser extent in his earlier fiction.

Reaper Man's twin A-plots are marked out by subtly different font weights.

Also in Reaper Man, Death's scythe is shown to be sharp enough to slice whatever's being said at the time, leaving big ol' slashes and chopping the rest of the sentence onto the next line of the page.

In Thief of Time, Wen is shown to be affecting time with his Procrastinator by repeating the last few lines, the last sentence, or even the last few letters, as if Wen were playing scratch artist with the universe.

Also in Thief of Time, each chapter break is marked with the tick of a clock... until the Glass Clock stops time, and the breaks are marked with a simple space as in the other books. The chapter break after the Clock stops time is marked with a ti-... and the breaks are marked with a simple space, until time resumes with an -ick. Thereafter chapter breaks are marked with tick again.

In Witches Abroad, while describing the stillness and silence pervading a sleep-bewitched castle, the narrative itself gets rudely interrupted:

There was no sound in the-

"Open up there!"

-no sound in the-

There was a tinkle of broken glass.

"You've broken their window!"

- not a sound in the-

And in Small Gods, a powerful deity speaks in numbered, Biblical-style verses.

In the hardback edition of Feet of Clay, the (speechless) golems write their words in an Hebraic-looking script. Disappointingly, this was left out of the paperbacks (except the Corgi paperback), so the golems' text just appeared in bold letters. And the ones who can speak Speak Like That All The Time.

In Maskerade we come across a rogue "Up here?" in one of the margins. Nearer the bottom of the page, the protagonist starts to throw her voice...

One of the thugs in The Truth, Mr. Tulip, says things like, "Shall I hit him up alongside the —ing head with the —ing oar again?" It's not until you're partway through the book that you learn he's really just saying "ing" in a very angry and aggressive way.

Several characters are also noted for their ability to pronounce punctuation and italics. The sort of people who can pronounce Wiki Words.

There's one paragraph in Going Postal which appears to be a multi-line sentence of dialogue by the main character, only to have the quotes followed by "is what he did not say, because ..."

In Men at Arms, there's what seems to be Carrot's one and only venture into first-person internal monologue. It turns out to be Gaspode, using his "put words into the human's head" trick. Unsuccessfully.

Going Postal also feature's a greengrocer who suffer's from a bad ca'se of "Greengrocer's apostrophe", as in "Red Apples's". His speech is peppered with apostrope's where they arent needed, and its missin'g them where they are. We find out in Making Money that thi's is required by grocer's guild rule's.

Carrot can pronounce "d*mn", said to be "a difficult linguistic feat".

In several books, when a character mentions something Important, it is written with the First Letter in each word Capitalized. Other characters note that they can Hear the Capital Letters.

In Mort, a gang of muggers are very surprised when their victim, the title character, walks backwards through a wall as if it were insubstantial. The response:

'Well, —— me,' he said. 'A ——ing wizard. I hate ——ing wizards!'

'You shouldn't —— them, then,' muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes.

In Night Watch, the bell that rings silences is set tolling out of control, making everyone's dialog intersperse with blanks until it's fixed.

In Moving Pictures, when film-reality intrudes on Disc-reality and the scene goes soundless, the only things Victor and Ginger can express to one another is "!" and "?". Twoflower in The Colour of Magic spoke in the same way when he wasn't using his translation dictionary.

One of the earlier books had an elderly wizard who could pronounce brackets (when he used them, which was often).

Edward D'eath is a very dangerous person, as illustrated by his ability to "think in italics".

Both Pyramids and Good Omens feature old characters (mummies who have been brought back to life and a 17th-century witch, respectively) who talk exclusively in "Old English," and therefore say things like, "Thys ys spookye."

Esk gazed down defiantly. Granny glared up sternly. Their wills clanged like cymbals and the air between them thickened. But Granny had spent a lifetime bending recalcitrant creatures to her bidding and, while Esk was a surprisingly strong opponent, it was obvious that she would give in before the end of the paragraph.

Referenced in Hogfather, when the narrative states that it'd be hard to properly describe how Death emerges from a small opening without folding the page.

From The Bad Beginning, the first book, comes this quote: "He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over."

In a later book, the author spends a page talking about deja vu, and following it, a copy of (almost) that exact same page talking about deja vu.

Yet another later book mixed normal text with mirrored text.

Yet another book states that "you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever..." and then you turn the page and the entire next page is taken up by "...ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever..."

And yet another book features the trio falling down a very long elevator shaft. Two pages are pure black. Stop for a moment to consider how closely Handler/Snicket must have worked with his publisher to get the word counts to exactly fit the trick pages.

Another example mentioned how sometimes books would have passages that would seem to make no sense to people who were just skimming, to get them to go back and actually read the book. This was followed by a sentence about construction workers carrying a door.

Another book contained a long, boring, and appropriately circular passage about the Water Cycle, so that Lemony could slip in a secret message to his sister under the impression that anyone else would have stopped reading by this point.

No part of this book may be used, reproduced, destroyed, tampered with, or eaten without written permission except in the case of brief, possibly coded quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and subpoenas.

According to Wikipedia, when The Hobbit was published Tolkien wished for "Thrór's map to be tipped in (that is, glued in after the book has been bound) at first mention in the text, and with the moon-letters (Anglo-Saxon runes) on the reverse so they could be seen when held up to the light." This turned out to be prohibitively expensive and was left undone. Alas.

Fortunately the 'moon letter' version of the map has been created in the 2004 deluxe edition.

In some editions of Daniel Handler's book Watch Your Mouth, the second half of the story is printed in burgundy.

Life of Pi ends with an extended conversation, written in script form, between the protagonist and two Japanese businessmen. The Japanese businessmen alternate between speaking to the protagonist in English and to each other in Japanese. The Japanese dialogue is denoted with a bold, paintbrush-like font.

The Neverending Story uses two different colors for the two reality levels in the book, or two different typefaces in cheaper printings.

The book is printed in three colors, although there are some variations between the different versions of the book. Normal text is printed in black, the word "house" appears in blue, and references to mythology are in red, with the addition of colored and Braille plates. "Minotaur" may or may not be struck out, depending on whether it's used during one of the aforementioned mythology references. In addition, there are a few instances of purple in the book as well, including the phrase "A Novel" on the front cover, the edition number, and one instance of a struck-out purple phrase in Chapter XXI. There are two different typefaces, which are used to represent the contributions of the elderly blind man, Zampano, and the twenty-something slacker, Johnny Truant, with a rare third typeface for "The Editors" — and even the accuracy of the typefaces is called into question. Mirror text is used on occasion; some pages have only a few words sparsely placed, and in odd orientations. A labyrinth is represented by a chapter consisting almost wholly of footnotes which refer to each other in a way that can only be described as labyrinthine. The vote is out on if it's good surrealism or pretentious crap.

Some paperback editions have covers that are smaller than the pages. The book is larger on the inside than on the outside.

Danielewski's second book, Only Revolutions, had two stories, one starting from the front and one from the back. With every passing page, a little less page space was given to the one story and a little more to the other story, until at the middle of the book it's exactly 50/50. (Oh, and there's a hint to the font colors in this novel.)

Danielewski's The Fifty Year Sword uses different colors of quotation marks to indicate different speakers.

"jPod" is a post modern novel by Douglas Coupland. Examples of this trope range from spending 16 pages listing prime numbers between 10,000 and 20,000, with one non-prime number added as a game, to random pop-up and spam emails repeated verbatim in the middle of a scene.

The children's book The Monster at the End of This Book has Sesame Street's Grover going to greater and greater lengths to keep the reader from turning the page (as he's afraid of the eponymous monster at the end of the book). He tapes pages together, attempts to nail them down, builds a brick wall, all to no avail. (It's okay, though, as the monster at the end of the book turns out to be himself.)

Another book, Oscar's Grouch Book, has Oscar the Grouch trying to get the reader to stop reading and leave him alone, through a series of similar tricks.

A mainstay of the Thursday Next novels. The most prominent example is the Footnoterphone, which enables Jurisfiction agents to communicate long-distance via the footnotes of the novels. Certain characters speak exclusively in "Olde English" or "Courier Bold," which are treated as foreign languages by the characters even though they are perfectly comprehensible to the readers.

In serious trouble at one point, she escapes into the Footnoterphone conduits. The story continues in the footnotes, while the main text is blank.

It's better than that: Thursday escapes into the footnotes, and her story then continues in parallel to the main text, in which the people she escaped from are trying to figure out where she has gone. This does, of course, leave the reader to decide whether to read the main text first, the footnotes first, or to switch between the two.

Thursday wows the Bookworlders by being able to tell who is speaking even when they turn off their dialogue tags (he said).

The most recent book includes a sequence in which Thurs is thrown outside the bounds of the BookWorld, resulting in several wordless pages in graphic novel format.

There is also a scene with characters fighting a mispeling vyrus which as the progretion of the vyrus grows teh speling geets progresivvly wers.

Not to mention the Bookworm's, which ex'crete apo's'trophe's & ampers&s.

Or the grammarvores who consume punctuation and grammar which have overrun Finnegans Wake.

In Insomnia, certain characters' telepathic thoughts fade out and back in, signifying that something is wrong with them. The text of their thoughts actuallyfadesintoillegibility,thenbecomesclear and readable again.

In his later efforts (Lisey's Story, The Dark Tower volumes 4-7), King experiments frequently with changing fonts and typefaces.

His short story "Survivor Type" is written as the diary of a surgeon who is shipwrecked on a desert island. After he starts to go crazy and cut off parts of his own body for food, his entries become more erratic and nonsensical.

Another example used in almost all his works is when a sentence abruptly stops followed by some italicised words in the lines below in brackets before the sentence continues. This is usually done for characters who are currently stressed, and the line usually shows the characters' (subconcious)inner thoughts about what they are describing.

The very title of a short story by F. Paul Wilson was written by placing the words "DAVID", "COPPE", and "RFIEL" over each other, creating an unpronounceable jumble. The word itself was capable of sounding like the correct answer of any question or proposal to anyone hearing it (though not to the person saying it).

Alfred Bester:

The novella Tiger! Tiger!, later expanded into the full-length novel The Stars My Destination, employs this excellently in the final two chapters. As the Anti-Hero protagonist Gully Foyle experiences synesthesia (a side effect of a nearby bomb blast), the text is written in an illustrative manner which reflects the confusion of his sensory apparatus.

In The Demolished Man, telepathic communication is represented by creative typesetting, sentences that can be read up, down, left or right simultaneously, rebuses, fonts and other trickery. Bester seemed very fond of this sort of thing in general.

An example: Two of the characters in this book are named @kins (Atkins) and 1/4maine (Quartermaine).

Babylon 5 is full of Shout Outs to Bester's work, down to naming a character Alfred Bester and giving him a Start of Darkness novel series with telepathic communication depicted as in The Demolished Man.

Another occurs in the short story Fondly Fahrenheit, about a schizophrenic mass murderer and his robot. At times the guy thinks of himself simply as himself, other times he thinks of himself as the robot, and then there's the times he thinks of them both as one person. All of this is accomplished by Bester constantly switching his use of pronouns.

In the Turing Hopper series by Donna Andrews, different typefaces are used for third-person narration vs. Turing's first-person commentary.

The 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne includes such features as a black page when a character dies, and a blank one allowing the reader to sketch their vision of a female character's appearance.

James Dickey's poem "Apollo" from The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead, and Mercy, uses a black page to represent the communications blackout that occurred when Apollo 8 first orbited the moon.

Older Than Print: An elegant example of this can be found in The Tale of Genji, the seminal novel of Heian-era Japan, in which the 42nd chapter, "Vanished into Clouds", is left blank entirely after the title — the subtle implication being the death of the title character.

Peter David's novel I, Q, working from the point-of-view of Q during the apocalyptic end of the universe, uses a few of these tricks. Data raises his voice above all other noise by rapidly increasing his font size. And near the very end, Q, spitting in the face of death, writes the book up and stuffs it into a bottle which he then hurls into the whirlpool sucking up all existence. The last sentence is cut off halfway (as Q is screaming his defiance of fate), and then followed by not a few completely blank pages. And when you're finally wondering what the heck is up, you run across a few pages of laughter. Seems God was so amused by Q's defiance that she (God) decided to cancel The End.

Vendetta (also by Peter David), did this when a character reached Warp 10. She got stuck in a time loop, so naturally her one-page chapter began to repeat every few chapters, then every other chapter, then for several chapters in a row, until finally it stopped in mid-sentence ("just a few more seconds...") and the next chapter had the Next Generation crew musing about what her existence might be like now.

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall features a scene where a conceptual shark (don't ask) is swimming toward the narrator, and the reader is treated to 45 pages of an ASCII shark getting slowly bigger and bigger as you flip the pages.

At one point, Interworld has the bottom quarter of a page go completely black, to symbolize the main character losing his memories.

The text for "The Mouse's Tale" winds down the page and narrows to a point, resembling a mouse's tail.

In the beginning of the sequel, an illustration of Alice going Through the Looking-Glass is matched up on the other side of the leaf with an illustration of her arrival. The second of these illustrations — the one showing Alice's arrival in Looking-Glass House — has Sir John Tenniel's distinctive monogram mirror-reversed.

Similarly, Karen Hesse's novel The Music of Dolphins is told by a young girl who was Raised by Wolves (or dolphins, as the case may be). At the beginning, the text is quite large and written in very simple sentences; as the narrator learns more English, the font size decreases and the breadth of vocabulary increases. She eventually has a breakdown and goes back to the ocean, forcing the text to return to its original simplified state.

The Athenian Murders by José Carlos Somoza played with this similarly to House of Leaves, with an apparent ancient Greek mystery being the bulk of the book and various footnotes telling other stories. One set of footnotes is by the original translator who was rumoured to have been murdered in the same fashion as the characters in the text, and another set of rare footnotes apparently by the editors of the copy you are actually reading. Most of the footnotes are from the current translator who is driving himself crazy, convinced that there is a hidden message in the translated text, and becomes convinced that the characters in the text are interacting with him. Eventually, it's revealed that both translators are fictional characters, and the entire book and all its footnotes was written by someone else. (Who, to make matters more confusing, wrote himself as one of the minor characters in the Greek mystery, making the translators characters created by someone in the text that they are translating.)

When Henry Esmond one of the novels of Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray came out, there was a special edition made to look like an eighteenth century novel in binding and font (it is a pastiche of such works).

In the Boris Akunin novel Leviathan, text in chapters written from the perspective of a Japanese is rotated ninety degrees. It doesn't really look like Japanese vertical writing, but it does look "exotic".

In The Eye of the World which begins the Wheel of Time series, an arc spanning several chapters is told in a disjointed series of flashbacks. Near the end, Rand, the focus of the arc, "wonder(s) if his whole sense of time was getting skewed". Fans speculated endlessly on whether this was deliberate editorial commentary or just an accident.

The Interior Life by Katherine Blake postulates an unexplained mental connection between an ordinary woman in our world and a mage in a fantasy universe; each one ends up advising the other on her problems. A fairly subtle font change is used to distinguish between the two points of view. (Out of print, but highly recommended if you can find it in a used bookstore.)

In Gridlinked by Neal Asher, the main character has a computer-"augmented" brain, which allows him to wirelessly communicate with other people, AIs, and computers. These communications are written in a different font from the rest of the book.

In The General series by David Drake, S.M. Stirling and Eric Flint, some of the characters mentally communicate with an artificially intelligent computer (The other "ghost" that appears later in the series is just a simulation run by that computer.) The strangeness of its manner of speaking is described in detail, and its statements are written in bold and without capital letters. Even more interesting, sometimes The Center _uses_ capitals. And characters comment on that.

Nineteen Eighty-Four consistently describes a certain radical book being said by characters either in italics or in a completely different font. It's even pointed out in the narrative text.

As usual, William Gibson goes for broke; his poem "Agrippa — A Book of the Dead" (about his dead father) was first released on an encrypted, uncopyable diskette that deleted itself as you read. The book version was printed in photosensitive ink, disappearing after prolonged exposure to light.

In the aftermath of the rape in Self, the text is split into two columns per page, presumably to be read at the same time. Sometimes one or both of the columns feature large amounts of blank space.

J. K. Rowling used it occasionally in the Harry Potter series, often with letters that'd be in a font made to resemble handwriting. Different people had different handwriting. In one instance, there's two blurry blobs on the page, and Hagrid explains in the letter that he smeared some of the ink with his tears. Funetik Aksent was also used.

In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close a father, writing to his dead son, mentions how he wishes he had an infinitely long book with which to write in, because he fears that at his current rate his words will start to slam into each other and become illegible. Farther along the letter the words do begin to get closer, then words start being printed on top of other words, and then the page is completely black.

The young protagonist Oskar solicits advice from a randomly-chosen clerk at an art store, seeking guidance in his search for information about his father, who died in the Twin Towers; later, the reader learns the entire episode is something of a red herring. The clerk mentions that when patrons scribble with a pen (in the store) to test it, often they write the name of a color, but rarely do they write in a different color than whichever word they're writing which names a color (such an act, she contends, would be psychologically unsettling). For example if you're testing a red pen you'd write "red" (all of this might help Oskar determine whether a slip of paper he'd earlier found—on which "Black" is written—refers to someone named So-and-so Black, or merely the color). The passage is accompanied by an "extra" page in the book, in which names of colors are written in different handwriting, at various angles (as if it were an oft-used scrap of paper from the store).

In Summon the Keeper by Tanya Huff, when one of the mundane characters hears the voice of Hell for the first time and tries to explain it to the protagonist, she asks if it sounded like it was speaking in all capitals, which the author did.

In Animorphs, the characters have the ability to communicate via telepathy or 'thought-speak' while in an animal form (as well, the alien Ax uses it when in his normal, mouthless body as his standard form of communication), and dialogue in thought-speak is indicated by the use of the '<' and '>' symbols instead of quotation marks.

In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Only In Death, the interchapter documents are printed in different fonts, and not straight on the page.

In C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, the last portion of the book is written in italics, to show it's not the same handwriting as the rest of the book. (The narrator had died in the middle of writing a sentence; a final note was written by one of the people who found the body.)

In the Whateley Universe, the superheroes Team Kimba have their own deviser-built communications system. When they're sub-vocalizing and talking over it, the dialogue is in <> instead of quotes, and marked with the codename of the speaker when the voice would be recognizable.

Walter Moers does these quite often. To name a few examples:

In The 13 ˝ Lives of Captain Bluebear, the font changes when the eponymous character is having an encyclopaedia moment and grows when a giant spider is running after him.

In the City of the Dreaming books, the main character is flipping through a book, and finds what he's looking for at the end of the right page. Both the character and the reader turn page, and BAM!

You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. You have just been poisoned. Repeated for the full double page. The pages following this little surprise are black and the text is in white font, as the main character faints due to the poison.

A similar thing happens in Ensel and Grete. Whenever the Author of the book disrupts the flow of the story to digress and talk about what he feels like, the font changes. At some place several pages of the word Brummli are written to terrorize the reader.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a series of letters between many of the characters. The reader is intended to interpret the novel as a bound collection of letters, and each includes headers with dates and signatures. It's very effective at drawing some readers in, especially since the viewpoints sufficiently show different characters' personalities, but it can also seem disjointed, since it switches around a lot and (usually) looks like normal fonts pretending to be letters.

In What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonja Sonnes, a 15-year-old girl tells her story in verse, though it progresses like a normal novel. The poetry experiments with several textual plays like e.e. cumming's style.

Don Marquis' archy and mehitabel, and other books in the series, are written from the perspective of Archy the cockroach, entirely in lowercase letters... because Archy can operate an old-fashioned typewriter by painstakingly hopping on the keys, but he can't hit shift at the same time! (Marquis would later handwave reader queries about how Archy handled the carriage return.) The shift key got locked down for (part of) one poem, titled "CAPITALS AT LAST."

In Still Life With Woodpecker the author alternates between writing a story and writing about himself writing the story. In the final chapter his typewriter breaks down and he is forced to finish in longhand.

Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron has a relatively subtle one. For the majority of the book, every character uses third person narration. After one character sells her soul her narration switches to first person — the implication being that she was telling the story all along, but is no longer the same person.

Iain (M.) Banksloves these. In Complicity, for example, one narrator's chapters are written in first person, while the other's are told in second person. Most infamously, Feersum Endjinn has about a third of the text written in Funetik Aksent. One of the characters (Bascule) is keeping a journal, but some kind of brain dysfunction makes him spell phonetically. It was woolseyized as containing absolutely egregious amounts of orthographic and spelling errors in the Polish version.

In Dune, some words like "SPICE" and "VOICE" tend to be printed in capital block letters to give them a sort of mystical echo (see above for DEATH in the Discworld novels). However, there are no capital letters in the Hebrew language, so the Hebrew translation has these words printed in bold and in a larger typeface than the rest of the sentence. This method makes them even more creepy and resonant than the original, if at all possible.

Most editions of The Bible in English print the word "LORD" in all-capitals and sometimes in blockier font. Also, to a lesser extent, the use of a capital letter in the words "He, "Him", "His", when referring to the monodeity.

This extends past the Bible. In most (if not all) denominations of Christianity, it's considered appropriate to always capitalize pronouns when referring to God.

A different version of this can be found in the Hebrew Bible, where God is often referred to by the Tetragrammaton (the "explicit name" often transliterated in English as "Yahweh" or "Jehovah"), which (unlike the rest of the text) completely lacks diacritics, causing it to stand out rather starkly against the rest of the text. Some instances of the all-capital "LORD" mentioned in the previous point are intended to convey such contexts.

The Hebrew diacritics are not that old. An older practice (not sure how widespread) was to write God's name in Phoenician script, with the rest of the text in Aramaic letters.

Martin Luther's translation of the Bible to German uses "Herr" ("lord" in his era, more like "mister" today) when referring to humans, "HErr" when God is referred to as "Adonai" (or Jesus as "Kyrios") in the original text, and "HERR" when it's "JHWH". Modern editions often still use "Herr" set in small caps for the last variant.

Note: German capitalizes all nouns, not just proper nouns as in English. Hence the special capitalization to distinguish nouns referring to the Deity.

It has also become somewhat popular among Christians (particularly in America) in the last century to print Jesus' speech in red. The color itself represents His blood sacrifice and the practice has the functional purpose of distinguishing his speech from the other text as it doesn't include quotation marks.

'Red Letter Christians' take their name from this, as they only follow the red letters.

The Alcatraz series by Brandon Sanderson uses text formatting to make jokes on several occasions, including printing part of it uʍopəpısdn.

The young adult comic fantasy Rogues To Riches includes a scene where two thieves talk their way out of jail by convincing their guard that he's just a mook in a story, and will probably die if he tries to stop them, as they're the heroes. However, if he foolishly lets them go, he'll be promoted to comic relief instead, and might just rate an appearance at the end of the book. Sure enough, the very last page shows the stupid guard sitting in the thieves' former prison cell, wondering if he'll appear at the end.

A Wayside School book had a chapter where a character is forced to write a story backwards (end is at the beginning and vice versa). As you might have guessed, the chapter itself is written backwards.

Also, whenever a character in the Wayside School books is upside-down for some reason (i.e., hanging from the monkey bars) their dialogue is printed uʍop-əpısdn.

And chapter nineteen is always weird or missing, like the nineteenth floor of the school.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy has the eponymous character's self-narrated chapters anecdoted with footnotes that digress from the current situation in some manner. Later, the reason given that these only appear in his chapters is due to him having a multi-tracked mind, in that he can hold several lines of thought simultaneously. As he says, the best he can do to simulate the effect for us is footnotes.

This is teased deliciously in the third book of the trilogy, Ptolemy's Gate. Bartimaeus and Nathaniel are sharing a body and reading each others' minds toward the end. At one point (in one of Nathaniel's chapters, no less!), Bartimaeus starts a footnote describing one of his old buddies. The footnote is interrupted, and when you jump back to the text that it sprung from, Nathaniel is thinking at Bartimaeus to stop thinking in two directions because it makes his head hurt.

In A Prayer for Owen Meany, the text is all in caps IN AN ATTEMPT TO PROPERLY CONVEY THE EPONYMOUS CHARACTER'S DISTINCTIVE VOICE.

Marjorie B. Kellogg's Dragon Quartet books use different fonts for each of the four dragons (at least in the first three books).

D.J. MacHale's Pendragon series uses different fonts to indicate whether the reader is reading the journals Bobby is sending to his friend Mark, or whether he's reading the narrative of Mark's life on Second Earth.

One series, the Fire Within, had a scene that went something along the lines of: "'I can't believe how much I don't understand about this silly family and their crazy dragons,' David said. Liz put a hand to her forehead and spoke, 'David, please stop talking in italics.'"

In the hardcover of The Princess Bride, "Goldman"'s interjections on the text are printed in red ink, while "Morgenstern"'s text is in black. In paperbacks, Goldman's parts are usually in italics.

Dan Simmons's novel The Terror features chapters written from various characters' points of view. One of them, a surgeon, has his written as diary entries. The one time he gets a normal chapter, it's mentioned that he was too tired to write. He later poisons himself and mentions that his mind will start to deteriorate. His spelling becomes worse and worse, random capitals are inserted everywhere, and letters and words are skipped entirely.

In Joan Hess's Claire Malloy mysteries, Claire's daughter speaks in Capital Letters when she's being overdramatic. Lampshaded in the narrative by Claire herself.

Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor numbers chapters backwards as a countdown to the crash of the plane in which the narrator is squatting, telling the black box the story of his life, expecting a miracle, or not.

Tom Clancy's novel Patriot Games uses this twice. The narrative is going on, describing a nice British park when suddenly the text cuts off. The word BOOM! is printed in bold in the center of a large blank space. This signifies the sudden and dramatic impact of the grenade that the ULA uses to disable the Prince of Wales's car. Later in the book, the chapter title is used to dramatic effect. The end of a chapter has Robby Jackson crouched on Jack's bed with a loaded shotgun, looking through a small window between rooms at where his wife, his close friends, and the Prince and Princess are being held hostage. The chapter ends with something like "Finally, he moved close to the other one." The next chapter begins by describing how fast pellets from a shotgun disperse. The title of the chapter (printed in huge bold font?) is "THE SOUND OF FREEDOM".

In Harlan Ellison's short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, the supercomputer AM describes its hate for humanity to Ted, the narrator, in a burning neon pillar of stainlness steel rammed into his soft grey brain matter. Yeah... it's kinda like that. Anyway, the computer's words are written in block capitals in a single thin column in the centre of the page.

Ellison also uses depictions of strips of punchcode tape,note encoded in International Telegraph Alphabet No 2 similar to that used in teletypewriters. There are two alternating messages: "I THINK, THEREFORE I AM" and "COGITO ERGO SUM." The author claims that from the story's first appearance in 1967 until its publication in 1991 in The Essential Ellison, every printing corrupted what he called AM's "talkfields."

Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, from the same short story collection, uses this trope to a greater extent to give a disorienting impression of the moment of death, by using short, unrelated abstract phrases separated by circles, as well as smaller text in a continuous block to show Maggie's soul being trapped in the slot machine she was playing. Again, it's kinda like that. In the introduction Ellison acknowledges the limitations of his medium and calls all this "experimentation" into expanding it. In interviews he has also claimed that the overall look of a page of writing in a book is relevant to the impression he wants it to create; one reason why he hates computers and writes all his stories on a typewriter.

In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero In Hell, the demon possessing Theo speaks in italics and ALL CAPS.

The Provost's Dog books are presented mostly as the journals of Beka Cooper, the protagonist. There is the occasional mispelling, especially when she is sick or exhausted. At one point, she falls asleep while writing and one of her words trails off into a wavy line running down the page. There is also a page where her cat jumps onto her journal, leaving a blob of ink where the inkwell is spilled, and a set of inky pawprints on the page.

In the Real Life "Baconian Cipher" (not actually a cipher, rather, a steganographic code), developed by Francis Bacon, two different typefaces (bold, italic, a different font, adifferentfontcolour, etc.) stand for the bits of a binary encoding, so that every five letters represent a single letter of a hidden text. It has, therefore, been suggested by some that Bacon in fact might have hidden clues to the supposed "fact" that he wrote William Shakespeare's plays by using this ciphe-er, steganographic code.

In The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, the format of the book changes to match the historical era each section is set in. At the beginning, chapters have elaborate descriptions and the prose is frequently interrupted by poetry. Gradually, the prose becomes more solid, the chapter headings shorten to just titles, then numbers, and then nothing but a blank spot between them and the next chapter.

In a very subtle example, in The Paths of the Dead, the word "brandy" is always written in italics, as is usually done for words in foreign languages. This is because the book is ostensibly an in-universe novel written by a Lemony Narrator Dragaeran, whose native dialect lumps brandy together with other fruit-derived alcoholic drinks as "wine".

In the book of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the "editor" makes a note that, for some time from that point on, Duke's writing is so chaotic—and so stained with various materials—that it's practically impossible to make out what exactly he was writing about. The editors explain, to the best of their ability, what they were able to piece together of the story from the mess, then they print a transcript of a section of audio tape of Duke and Doctor Gonzo talking to a woman. The movie achieves a similar function by having Duke—with no memory of the previous night (or nights)—try to make sense of his jumbled, damaged tapes, the film playing a montage of disconnected scenes for what's on the tape.

In Horatio Hornblower, it's well-established (if one reads in order of publication) that William Bush isn't very imaginative. Come Lieutenant, which is told from his point of view, there is a noticeable lack of the vivid metaphors and similes that pepper Hornblower's narration. One chapter sneaks some in by describing how interesting and beautiful a pulley rig on a cliff would look to someone other than Bush, who just sees a couple of ropes.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World does this. A lot of books will have the title written on the top of the book's pages. During Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, the "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" chapters simply have "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" written at the left, whereas "The End of the World" chapters have "The End of the World" written on the top right.

In the Relativity series, flashbacks are in blue text. (Provided you're reading them online, or on an e-reader with a color screen. At any rate, they are set off from the main text by "<<<" and ">>>" so even in a black-and-white format, you can clearly see where the flashbacks are.)

In the book The Name of this Book Is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch, the entire first chapter has been replaced by strings of Xs (because it's a secret).

In the Polish young reader book Cyryl, gdzie jesteś? (Cyryl, Where Are You?), two of the numerous viewpoint characters (the ones who aren't in the city where the majority of the plot takes place) have their own font style (italic and all-capitals text) used to describe the events in which they participate. Also, every few chapters, there are fourth wall-breaking musings from the author; these are depicted as hand-written notebook pages, even with some words striked out and replaced by others.

Whenever the title character starts really losing it in Jackrabbit Messiah by Geoph Essex, the voice he usually hears starts getting printed in smaller and smaller (and fainter) text. When he's totally lost his mind (leading up to The Climax), the dialogue from the less helpful voices in his head is printed in text that gradually fades in and out (in shades of gray) from the beginning to the end of each paragraph. It's described in the narration as a kind of schizophrenic "Doppler" effect, and the medium painting does a pretty effective job of demonstrating it.

Live-Action TV

'Allo 'Allo! was set in Nazi-occupied France and has characters of several nationalities speaking several different languages, all represented by the actors using deliberately bad accents. The Germans had bad German accents. The downed English airmen had bad English accents. The French had bad French accents, except when they were speaking English in which case they used bad English accents as well. The English spy masquerading as a French policeman had an atrocious French accent and mispronounced all his vowels (leading to endless double entendres), but only the French characters noticed. And so on.

And, of course, whenever a French character spoke "French" (i.e., English with a bad French accent) to an English character who only spoke "English" (i.e., English with over-the-top British accents and mannerisms), it was treated as being completely incomprehensible.

In the episode "Forest of the Dead", when Donna is trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine, she starts noticing all the jump cuts and realizes that though it seems time is passing, no time passes at all. Another character tells her about it: "You didn't get my note last night. You got it a few seconds ago. Having decided to come, you suddenly found yourself arriving. That is how time progresses here, in the manner of a dream."These jump cuts actually happen to her in-universe, since it's a computer world that creates the illusion of passing time.

Also done in "The Wedding of River Song". While the Doctor and Winston Churchill are walking and talking they, along with the audience, gradually realise they are fighting off the Silents in between the scene and camera changes.

The Weeping Angels' schtick of freezing when anybody's watching is as creepy as it is largely because the camera apparently counts as an observer. In one scene, an angel advances on a character by moving whenever its unwitting victim passes between it and the camera.

Whenever a location is shown on Fringe, the words hang there like they are part of the actual setting, sometimes with the camera avoiding the lettering as though it is actually there.

And in an episode mostly set during the Eighties, those words (and the opening credits) were changed into a font style typical of the period.

A similar thing happened in the House episode "No Reason": House is trying to solve a medical case while recovering from being shot in the beginning of the episode. So he briefly talks to his team in the ICU, then we jump cut to him continuing his discussion in a staircase... until he suddenly says "How did I get here?" and states he doesn't remember what happened in between said jump cuts. The events of the episode after the shooting are an hallucination.

One National Geographic special was about ninjas. It ended with a simulated comparison between ninja methods and modern military; a "VIP" was placed in a "hotel room" with two trained bodyguards-armed with laser pointer pistols. The "assault team" managed to get to the VIP in less than a minute. The "ninja" took nine hours, and used a disguise...as a member of the National Geographic film crew.

The Colbert Report once had Stephen respond to the people who didn't broadcast his show in HD by putting his hands in the parts of the screen which is cut off in the standard definition broadcast and sticking out the middle finger of each hand, after which he advises them to upgrade so that they can see it.

In the Wayne's World skits on Saturday Night Live, when Wayne and Garth want to do a dream sequence, they wave their arms and make "dream sequence" sound effects until the image fades. They do it to end the dream sequences too, but sometimes can't get particularly stubborn dream sequences to end when they want them to.

Lenny Henry hosted a show about dreams, in which he met an ancient philosopher who didn't speak English, so they agreed to talk in Subtitle. Further parodied when Lenny Henry is talking about whether dreaming of having tea with the queen and whether that meant it was important to really have tea with the queen. His subtitle replaced "tea with the queen" with "sex with Michelle Pfeiffer".

A number of How I Met Your Mother play with framing device by having Future!Ted openly alter what's happening either to censor it for his children or simply because he's forgotten the details.

Music

Autotune was first used to correct errors in pitch. Many modern musicians use it to deliberately distort their voice so it's obvious that they're using Autotune, as well as for aesthetic effect, even when they're fully capable of singing themselves. Some people have expressed their distaste. It is also called a Vocoder when used to this effect.

Music Videos

The music video for Kanye West's "Love Lockdown", if watched on a standard-definition TV or Youtube, is letterboxed. At about one minute in, a character in the video races towards the camera, then actually jumps out of the letterbox.

"The TV Show"'s central conceit it that it's showing us a series of TV shows being viewed by two guys in a control booth. Then one falls asleep on a console, and elements from some of the shows start interacting with each other, the camera, and the producers. Hilarity Ensues.

The video for Justice's remix of Lenny Kravitz's "Let Love Rule" feature the end of a fictitious movie and its credits sequence. Early on, the lead character's sleeve gets caught on one line of the credits. At first, things are fun, but then the video deconstructs the idea of having a credits sequence be a physical part of the world.

Pinballs

A common one in pinball machines with an autoplunger is to replace the launcher button with a prop relevant to the game's theme:

Whirlwind and Twister both have a fan on top of the backbox that blows at you during gameplay (though the former only activates it when a lock is lit and during multiball).

Instead of the amber-orange dot-matrix display used in other pinball games, Bram Stoker's Dracula uses a medium-red screen instead.

The Earthshaker! cabinet vibrates when an earthquake occurs (in the game).

No Good Gofers has "Short Circuit" mode, when one of the gophers begins nibbling on the wires inside the game. During that time, the prize wheel spins erratically back and forth, and the playfield lights flicker.

Black Rose uses the ball as a cannonball that is fired at things on the playfield.

Lights... Camera... Action! has a pair of spotlights (red and blue) which shine down on the player at key points of the game. In addition, most of the lights on the machine are out when the game begins until the director calls for "Lights."

Dutch Pinball's The Big Lebowski has a miniature rug that needs to be unrolled, along with a (fake) glass of White Russian sitting on a napkin inside the cabinet.

Print Media

The literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is as much a vehicle for editor Dave Eggers to play with the magazine format as a collection of fiction. The format changes with each issue, from paperback to hardcover to a collection of smaller booklets containing individual stories. One of the more elaborate issues (#17) was published as a bundle of misdelivered mail, containing some stories in individual envelopes and some in the fictitious magazines that the fictitious intended recipient subscribed to. Sometimes stories take advantage of the flexibility of the format: "Heart Suit", in issue 16, was printed on a deck of oversized playing cards and readable in any shuffled order. On a smaller scale, Eggers will sometimes put long rambling asides in the copyright notice and other bits of paratext.

The Dresden Files tabletop RPG rulebooks are... unique. They're presented as a rough draft written by Billy the werewolf and handed over to Harry for perusal and correction. As a result, they're full of marginalia written by Harry (complaining about how Billy describes him, making bad pop culture references, and yelling at him to cut out top-secret White Council information), Bob (technical details about magical beings, plus a bunch of dirty jokes), and Billy himself (responding to the other two), who are differentiated by different typefaces, colors, and sizes of "handwriting." There's sticky notes all over the place, Harry occasionally uses it as scrap paper, the illustrations are taped in, and Billy dropped it in a puddle. And when Harry is being used as an example character and starts griping in the marginalia about how he's starting to hate his "player", the fourth wall is in danger of being tipped over.

Used a lot in Magic: The Gathering. For example, in Time Spiral, the timeshifted cards are printed in the old card frame to show that they are from the past; in Planar Chaos, they are printed in an alternate version of the new frame to show that they are from an alternate universe (i.e., they are color-shifted versions of existing cards); and in Future Sight they are printed in a futuristic frame because they are previews of possible future sets. Also, there are numerous single-card examples in the Unglued and Unhinged joke sets:

"Old Fogey" and "Blast from the Past" are both in the old card face. "Old Fogey" also says "summon" instead of "creature".

Art for most cards is confined to a rectangular box in the middle. Planeswaker cards often have part of their art poking out the top of it, into the area usually reserved for the card name.

Done with the rulebooks for Paranoia. Player documents have security level Red, while gamemaster materials are classified Ultraviolet. Since the players' Troubleshooters start at Red level, they are technically guilty of treason if they read the higher-level rules. The GM is encouraged to terminate the PCs if they try to game the rules, and players are encouraged — in true Paranoia fashion — to know the rules but don't let on that they know them...

Game supplements for Shadowrun are often presented in the form of in-character online documents, to which various deckers have appended their own commentary. Often their remarks contain plot-hooks for Game Masters as well as jokes for readers.

In the original Malkavian Clanbook for Vampire: The Masquerade, various pages throughout the book were altered, using mirrored text and other techniques. One of the most dramatic was a page talking about alternate food sources for some Malkavians. As it reached the end of the page it discussed a particular vampire who fed on words — and then featured a picture of said vampire who appeared to be eating the text off the page, leaving scattered words and a large blank area.

What's even scarier, the Malkavian in question was supposed to eat not only words, but also ideas that these words represent. Cue the paragraph about the Word-Eater's diet not only blurring and falling apart under his hand, but at the same time degrading into gibberish ending with an orphaned line on the other page: "...and other butchers' aprons."

This is actually the origin of the traditional ninja costume. In kabuki theater, the stagehands were clothed head to toe in black, which made them easy to ignore. As long as they were ignored, they were invisible. Thus, when ninja characters were put in the same outfit, they were ignored, too... right until they jumped out and became part of the production. The actors of course pretended they weren't there in-universe, just as the audience essentially was trained to ignore them.

Given the difficulty in transferring Terry Pratchett's famous footnotes to the stage, the play adaptation of Guards! Guards! recommends having someone in a footnote costume — complete with a label on their shirt — step on stage, hit a klaxon to get everyone to freeze, deliver the footnote, hit the klaxon, and then leave as everyone goes back to normal.

In another Discworld play, Discworld/Maskerade, this is the recommended way of portraying the impossible talents of Agnes Nitt: for the singing lesson scene, the script recommends that 'Agnes' stands at the back of the auditorium, with Dr. Undershaft facing out to speak to her, and her singing, which is all pre-recorded, is played in by P.A. This covers for the fact that Agnes is supposed to be an uncannily good mimic (and the fact that the plays are usually performed by non-professionals, and so her abilities are usually created with trick recording)— it's less awkward than having the actress mime.

Shakespeare's plays include a number of jokes based on the custom that the female roles were played by men.

Jean Racine got some of his best effects by inflicting small, perfectly calculated cracks in the weirdly rigid wall of conventions that defined 17th-century French theatre. Take Phèdre: to the tastemakers of King Louis' court, it was obvious—virtually holy writ—that a stage is immaculately unfurnished, and that royal personages never show weakness. In that environment, putting a chair into the opening scene and having a queen collapse into it had an effect not unlike rolling a grenade onto the stage. It was Racine's economical way of announcing "hang on, because all bets are now off."

The theatrical version and most other adaptations of Peter Pan do this with Tinker Bell. In-universe, the characters learn to understand her, but what she says is usually relayed to the audience via these characters... since the audience does not understand, either.

Kingdom Hearts actually has some fun with this - whenever Tinkerbell is onscreen and interacts with the characters, they don't understand her - unless that is, someone who does (such as Peter) is around to interpret for her. In Birth by Sleep, Ventus spends some time with Peter Pan and Tinker Bell by extension. When his lookalike Roxas is in Neverland in 358/2 days, Tinkerbell practically laser-focuses to him and seems to be quite insistent that Roxas go somewhere. Roxas can't understand her... and neither can the audience, but if one had remembered Birth by Sleep, you can only imagine what kind of important plot details she was giving!

Disney's franchise about the fairies of neverland also have Tinkerbell speaking clear English to the audience... as it's told from her perspective. Ergo it would make sense you can understand her.

Video Games

The vintage adventure game Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders represents the eponymous character's eponymous treatment by emptying his set of commands and having them gradually return as he recovers.

Captain Blood represents the degenerative disease the main character quests to cure with an increasingly jittery mouse cursor.

The DOS installation program of the first Command & Conquer pretends to be an elaborate setup sequence of the AI interface.

In the Red Alert games, the installer pretends to be a highly classified program that contains an intelligence briefing on the current situation. Your CD-key is called a "security clearance code" by the "secret program".

The setup process Red Alert 2 pretends to have hacked into the Allied network, requiring you to use your CD-key to disable the security measures. The installation itself plays out as a slideshow briefing.

It also takes the liberty of informing you that a Navy SEAL team has been dispatched to your location.

In Firestorm, Nod's CABAL taccon AI goes rogue and tries to kill the player. For the next mission, you have none of the usual voice responses from your HUD, because those are all generated by CABAL; the mission after that is to steal a GDI EVA as a replacement, and the player's UI is changed to the GDI voice for the rest of the campaign.

In an interview with the developers, they said worked on the idea that you were a "telegeneral" leading your troops through communications links from a control centre — you're supposed to be sitting in front of a computer guiding your forces in the manner of someone playing a real-time strategy game.

The actual interface shows up in Renegade, and the idea of "battle commanders" comes up a few times throughout the series.

The Rats, a 1985 Spectrum horror strategy interspaced with scenes of text adventure (unfortunately written years before this concept became feasible), depicts the encroaching presence of rats by having teeth marks, claw marks and actual vermin appear on the screen, and being killed by a rat by having one TEAR THROUGH THE TEXT WINDOW AND LUNGE AT YOU!

The Prisoner, a 1980 Edu-Ware game, upped the ante by having the game over scenario involve entering in a specific secret code at any point in the game. This includes at least once scenario where the game apparently crashes to the operating system prompt and a recovery program asks for the line number of the crash... which just happens to be your secret number.

The fourth Tropico game has a Modern TimesExpansion Pack that unlocks new buildings and edicts as time passes in-game. After 1986, you can enact Ban Social Networks to increase productivity, disabling the integrated Twitter and Facebook functionality of the game in the process.

The DS game The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has a puzzle that requires an emblem to be "stamped" upon the player's map from an inverted map. The solution? Move the inverted map to the top screen, open your map on the bottom screen, and physically close the Nintendo DS. Problem solved!

The same puzzle is used in Cing's two DS Adventure games: Another Code (also known as Trace Memory in North America) and Hotel Dusk: Room 215, and is the way to defeat a Metal Slime in The World Ends with You.

Up until that point, you've been manipulated by your superiors and heard numerous references to a "simulation" of some kind. In this last area, the idea of the game being a simulation starts getting pushed harder and harder, with a fake Game Over screen that can kill you for real if you're not paying close enough attention. Mission Control also starts to call you with increasingly deranged messages that reference the first three games and mock the main character/player for thinking he's some kind of hero. In short, it uses the very conventions of the game to mock both you and itself.

When using the Directional Microphone, subtitles will get larger and smaller depending on how on-point you are listening in.

MGS 3 also gives us the scene with Ocelot. Not only are bees all around after the fight, they usually stick to the screen. Enough to make some players feelparanoid

Mission Control also tells Snake to utilize all of his senses to their fullest, including taking in the scents of the environment. The obvious difficulty, as Snake points out, is that he can't smell. At all.

"Well, then I guess you'll just have to trust your instincts as a gamer."

Guns of the Patriots has a flashback to the first Metal Gear Solidwhich appears with PS1 graphics, including a dream sequence that you actually play. Also, Psycho Mantis is back: when he tries his old tricks, you realize you can't change controller ports and changing controller order doesn't work, he realizes there isn't a memory card anymore, and he gets pissed if you're using SixAxis controller, which doesn't vibrate.

Final Fantasy V often used a cartoonish thought bubble over the characters' heads reading '?' whenever something confused them. When Galuf meets his granddaughter Krile in the Ronka Ruins, the bubble appears again. Then it bounces away across the floor as he regains his memories.

High concentrations of Mist in Final Fantasy XII produce distorted reflections of the characters, their surroundings, and their status bars.

In Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, the game's spritework is of higher quality than the original game; in general, everything is larger and, as a result, more detailed and more smoothly drawn. This is especially noticeable on people. Whenever the story calls for a flasback, (flashing back to the destruction of Mist, for example), the spritework reverts to the original squat style of Final Fantasy IV. A copout to avoid remaking the scenes with new sprites? Not quite, as the style also reverts when flashing back to events not in the original, like Ceodore's birth.

The makers of Crisis Core promised that their slot-machine-inspired "Digital Mind Wave" combat system, which seems like just a game mechanic, would somehow prove to be a pivotal, emotionally intense plot point at the end of the game. Anyone who doesn't believe them obviously hasn't played to the final battle...

The main menu for each FreeSpace space sim is a mock-up of the inside of the carrier the player character is stationed on. To play a mission, click on the ready room doors. The atmospheric impact well makes up for the fact that changing carriers in the plot means that the player won't even know where the exit button is.

The main menus of X-Wing and TIE Fighter do this as well. The game opens up with a pilot selection screen presented as a roster. An officer will ask you to enter your identity, and if you try to skip ahead, armed guards will block you. Once you get inside, the main menu is presented as the interior of a Rebel or Imperial base. In X-Wing Alliance, the main menu becomes the ship the player is based at ala Freespace.

In X-Wing Alliance, this "hangar menu" is more than just a menu styled like the hangar—it actually is the hangar, as becomes especially apparent when, during a mission when your ship is under attack, you can enter the hangar to rearm and the red alert lights will be flashing and the battle going on even though you're at the menu screen.

In the pilot entry screen in X-Wing, the computer will refuse to let you play if you enter "Vader" as your name, since the Alliance doesn't admit "known Imperial agents".

Flight sims love to play with this trope, living up to their "simulation" status. For example, F-15 Strike Eagle III's main menu is a recreation of a hanger at the Nellis, NV air force base, with pilot selection being done by clicking on a locker, mission selection by clicking on a map or officer, and starting the mission by clicking on a plane just outside the hangar.

Jetfighter III had a whole aircraft carrier for the player to explore. You could choose and arm your plane, read your in-game mail, paint your squad emblem and launch your plane by getting into the right room.

AV8B Harrier Assault similarly let the player explore the decks of an amphibious assault ship. Since the game is a combination RTS/flight simulator, the player transitions between the roles of Harrier pilot and task force commander by moving from the pilots' briefing room/flight deck and the command center or vice versa. Additionally, rather than simply display information such as numbers of available aircraft, ground units, and supplies on an in-game computer screen, the player could check on this themselves by visiting the appropriate deck.

The interface of the strategy game Evil Genius conspicuously reconfigures itself during the final stages, down to a large section sliding aside to reveal a big red "launch" button.

The 1985 wargame Theatre Europe simulates conventional WWIII. Accessing nuclear weapons requires a real-world phone call. Wikipedia: "The telephone number connected the player to a recorded message, which started with the sound of air raid sirens and dramatically built up through various sounds of war to a huge explosion, followed by the sound of a crying baby. As this faded out, a voice stated "If this is really what you want... the code is 'Midnight Sun'"." Global thermonuclear war is a complete loss; for single strategic missiles, the player has to remember to turn off automatic retaliation for nuclear attacks with equal or stronger force, a system that both sides use and which responds to retaliations. At the hardest difficulty level, it's impossible to win as the Warsaw Pact.

There is a level of the Reservoir Dogs game where you play as Mr Brown, the getaway driver who has been shot in the head; in the movie we cut directly to him crashing the car after several miles and shouting, "I'm blind!", to which Mr Orange informs him that he isn't blind, he just has blood in his eyes. In the game, you have to drive Pink and White out of the jewelery store with your sight increasingly obscured by blood dripping down the screen, a narrowing field of vision, and eventually flickering between black and white, colour and sepia tone.

Ron DeLite of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations occasionally trails off in his speech as the text fades to match the window's color. Throughout the series, characters have their text scroll faster when they're nervous or angry, indicating that they're speaking faster; three separate characters (Wendy Oldbag, Moe the Clown and Wesley Stickler) have their text move so fast it's nigh-impossible to follow when they start rambling. When someone yells, their text shoots up in size.

In No More Heroes, when Travis gets a call on his cell phone, it comes through the Wii Remote's speaker instead of the TV's speakers. As such, the volume is (in theory) lower and thus you're holding the Wii Remote to your ear as Travis holds his cell phone to his. (In practice, the voice coming through the remote is surprisingly loud — Sylvia has No Indoor Voice.)

That's not even going into everything that happens once you finally make it to the final ranked battle. The poor, unfortunate fourth wall gets painted, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, and then the pieces get repainted. It's the most divisive ending since the MGS2 Ending.

Speaking of Metal Gear, if you have a wireless headset registered to your PS3, you can receive CODEC audio via the headset rather than your speakers.

The oddness continues in that news broadcasts on various TVs, which serve as background and interesting little recaps of your more public adventures in the game for other characters, take a more sinister turn for Malkavians. Not only does the news anchor speak directly to you, his descriptions of various stories are far more twisted and violent than normal — the game's way of translating your character's madness into a form that the player can directly experience.

There was a Malkavian Thin Blood on the beach in Santa Monica who offered to read your future. She actually did describe events that happened in the game (though they only make sense in retrospect), and if your character was Malkavian, your lines would add even more information. Also, if asked about how it all ends, she'd answer that it's not important whether you win or lose, it's if you bought the game that counts.

For a time in the early 1990s, it became almost de rigeur for platform games to make the player's avatar get bored and in some way address the player if not moved for some time. We have a trope for those things.

The classic Infocom text adventure The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a scenario whereby you cause a Temporal Paradox, which, in typical HHGTTG style, destroys the universe in a most thorough fashion. The game explains in literary detail the havoc which ensues, ending with "The universe ceases to have ever exis" — cut off just like that, in mid-"existed".

In Tales of Hearts, the characters experience the Mysterious Waif's guilt flashback to just before she had an inadvertent hand in Armageddon. Late in this flashback, another character tells her past self to come along and begin the project. Her text box simply says "Yes," but the voice actress screams out "No!" At this moment, the viewer-character separates from the flashback-character and enters the final stage of her Heroic B.S.O.D..

Happens at least once in Super Robot WarsOriginal Generation 2. Normally, when you begin a mission, there's a short text explanation of what's happening, then the mission's number and name appear on a blue background before fading out to reveal the map and begin the actual gameplay. However, on some important occasions, this screen doesn't appear, and instead these details flash up onto the screen after said important occasion has occured. When this happens during episode 30, immediately after having -EPISODE 30- DYGENGUARD- appear on the screen, the level boss yells out "What was that!? ...And what does "Episode 30" mean!?".

In the first two Fallout games the character's dialogue options depend on his intelligence. A sufficiently stupid character will only be able to say "Duh."

In the second one, they made a joke about it that also painted the fourth wall. Early in the game, you meet a very dull-witted man (Torr). If you try to talk to him as a character of average or higher intelligence, he'll just respond with grunts and short words. If you are also of low intelligence, you will have a conversation of 'Duh!' and 'Grr bad man' translated into verbose and elaborate speech, in which you discover a very helpful piece of information much quicker than usual.

Sonic the Hedgehog CD has a subtle one concerning its soundtrack, tying with the time travelling gimmick: in the original Sega CD release, the music tracks for Present and Future areas are in Redbook Audio, while the Past songs are in analog PCM (and thus, of lower quality).

The Warcraft games have a subtle detail. The UI has a sword on the button for "attack," a shield on "stop," et cetera, so upgrading equipment makes those buttons fancier.

This is also true of World of Warcraft's auto-attack and auto-shoot buttons, which use your currently equipped weapon's icon (or cat or bear paws, for druids in those forms).

Clicking on characters will result in the character speaking as though they are waiting for you to issue their orders. Clicking on the same person multiple times in succession causes them to get annoyed with you. Some of the characters will demand to know why you keep poking them.

Splinter Cell: Convictionuses the rather cool technique of 'projecting' elements like mission objectives and backstory onto the surrounding environment. For example, as Sam approaches a mansion the words "Infiltrate the Mansion" appear on its facade like they're being beamed from a film projector.

At the end of the Third Echelon HQ level, Sam learns that his daughter's death was faked and goes into a full-blown Unstoppable Rage. To illustrate this, the player is given unlimited Mark and Executes, allowing you to finish the level by headshotting everyone as soon as they appear.

Blacklist continues this trend, with images appearing on the walls whenever one of Sam's teammates talks over the radio. It also paints the briefing menu in the final mission - instead of the normal "launch the mission?" prompt, it prompts you three times, as one by one, each of Sam's teammates agrees to launch the mission.

Wet is heavily influenced by the Hong Kong action films of the 80s and early 90s, along with the drive-in movies and grindhouse films of earlier decades. As a constant reminder of this, it uses phony projector tricks similar to Grindhouse — fake fading and scratching, the film slowing down when you're near death and catching and burning when you die, loading screens composed of in-film advertisements, etc.

This is the primary gimmick of the Viewtiful Joe series, except that the player controls them, and it's cinematic tropes that are used. Slow motion lets our hero dodge attacks and punch more dramatically (and punch bullets), zoom in temporarily stuns foes, mach speed lets him move very fast, Silvia's Replay lets her attack for triple the damage, and sometimes Joe will smack foes so had they bounce off the screen.

In Modern Warfare, cutscenes before the start of a mission are presented as the networking and information system used by the protagonists' various orginizations displaying relevant information while important characters speak over it, although the presentation itself is a heavy dramatization of what anything like this in reality would be displaying, it takes up the entire screen and the characters speaking are never seen, as if they're standing right next to you, watching it just like you are. And then it's taken up a notch in Modern Warfare 2 when one entire cutscene is, with no elements recognizable from the game itself, the emergency broadcast system of Washington DC, telling you where to go for evacuation as the Russians invade the city.

Dialogue cut from the first game would have had Griggs comparing the two player characters to one another. Likewise in Call of Duty: Black Ops, the player can find a hidden text file where the main player character of the game, Mason, recounts his time in a Russian gulag; he notes early on that Reznov told him stories about Dimitri Petrenko, the player character of World at War that this game is a sequel to, and mentioned that he and Mason were much alike.

The main Assassin's Creed games are masters of this trope: the Framing Story takes place near the end of 2012, and you only play as the Assassins through accessing their genetic memories through a device called the Animus. The game uses this to justify several standard video game tropes, most obviously why the HUD is laid out the way it is — because the Animus is letting Desmond control his ancestors like a video game. Losing health is called "desynchronizing," and fully desynchronizing (i.e., dying or failing mission objectives) simply restarts the genetic memory from the last checkpoint.

The sequel takes it up a notch with the Animus 2.0, which adds several gameplay refinements and subtitles, which were absent in the first game. A note in the game's manual from Lucy is a reminder to fix the nasty bug in the Animus 1.0 software that prevented the ancestor from swimming (and indeed, Ezio is a very prolific swimmer), and a side conversation has Desmond thanking a member of his Mission Control for the subtitles.

Black Flag and Unity go even further, referencing the development of, and eventual release of, a Templar-developed video game console based upon the Animus technology.

The Golden Sun games tend to avoid this, with the exception of the final battles in both games. Just as the fight starts the screen appears to shatter.

During the Little Sister sequence in Bioshock 2, the city of Rapture becomes significantly more serene and dream-like. White satin and roses adorn everything, and the bloom is cranked up to eleven. The game occasionally flashes back to the normal view to remind you how much of a hellhole Rapture really is. And that was the creepiest part of the entire game.

Speaking of chainsaws: In Brain Dead 13, if Lance gets killed during Fritz's sword-versus-chainsaw battle, pieces of Lance's skin will fly and land onto the camera. Messy!

And again, in Splatterhouse 2, when you defeat the boss in the tool shed, blood pours all over the screen. This is the only time in the series when it happens.

That is, until the remake came along where blood spilling on the screen is quite common, and some enemies will be splattered against the fourth wall during the 2-D sections when whacked with a blunt weapon.

In Pokémon Black and White, the character, N, is chastised by Cheren for speaking too fast. This fact is highlighted by the fact that the text appears in the dialogue box much more quickly than they do for other characters, even when one has their text speed set as fast as it will go.

In the Explorers installments of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, upon encountering Primal Dialga in a cutscene, he will roar so loudly that your screen will shatter.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 also does that by having the boss make his entrance by ripping apart the victory screen (or if you continued, the character select screen) from behind as if it were paper. Likewise, the super move background is also papery —- slashing moves leave marks on it and fire moves burn it away at the end instead of the background ripping itself apart.

Canonically, nothing in Kingdom of Loathing is painted to the fourth wall, it's all real to that world. It really is black-on-white line art populated with stick figure people.

In the early Resident Evil games, there are places where you can shoot the fourth wall/camera, causing bullet holes to appear momentarily.

With regard to the entries about cases where blood spatters the screen (which also happens in some Grand Theft Auto games, by the way), many racing games feature similar effects such as water or dirt hitting the screen if the player chooses to place the camera outside of the car, to convey a similar sense of being in the driver's seat.

In Portal 2, the Aperture Laboratories logo on loading screens changes depending on the part of the facility you're in; in decommissioned old chambers it changes to the old Aperture logos the company had at the time those chambers were built, and when the player returns to the modern facility after it was taken over by Wheatley, the logo reads "Wheatley Laboratories". Some of the tutorial's on-screen prompts are mislabeled, cheerfully implying that the main character may have "a very minor case of serious brain damage."

The Deadly Tower Of Monsters purports to be a cheesy sci-fi B-Movie from the early 1970's, with bad effects. At one point you acquire a pair of scissors and use them to cut the strings that monsters are suspended by.

In Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, as you lose sanity, the game will do things to screw with the player, such as turn the volume down or pretend that your Gamecube has been reset.

The original version of Star Control II predated digitised speech so each alien race spoke to you in a different font, matched to their personality. For example, the Ur-Quan had a heavy, declamatory font, while the terminally depressed Utwig have a spiderey one.

In the iOS game The Heist, you regularly recieve phone calls from the PC's partner in crime. During said calls, the game actually mimics the iPhone "incoming call" interface to give the illusion that you're recieving an actual phone call. The final call even has the partner using Facetime. However, this has the drawback of looking silly when you're playing on an iPod touch...

The Mr. Saturns in EarthBound are the only characters in the game to speak in a different font from everyone else, highlighting how strange and different they are. This continues in MOTHER 3.

Fahrenheit has a quick-time event where the on-screen cues light up like a Christmas tree, and it becomes impossible to win. This represents the way the main character has panicked and is franctically hammering on a keypad. There's also a scene where the solution is to fail a series of quick-time events, since they're for making the main character shake off a horde of glowing hallucinatory spiders, actions which the not-hallucinating policeman interrogating you will take as proof of violent intent.

In Mass Effect, the various starting menus and character creation scenes are invariably part of some in-universe computer system. Also, the Bullet Time effect in Mass Effect 3, in addition to being used for standard action sequences like the shootout with Dr. Eva, pops up whenever Shepard suffers health damage or is stunned by attacks.

Doors in Mass Effect 2 have either a red (locked), yellow (hackable), or green (open) symbol in the middle that serves as your interaction point with the door. During the Overlord DLC adventure, the symbols start blinking different colors or giving false information, culminating in one of them sliding across a wall to another door, to demonstrate just how much the AI has screwed up the base systems.

The Wii U console features context-sensitive audio. For starters, the instruments in the menu music are divided between the TV and main gamepad's speakers. The player holding the gamepad will also receive special audio based on the game they're playing or the menu they're looking at.

The main menu of Knights of the Old Republic II: Sith Lords will be one of the titular sith lords depending on how far your current game has progressed: Darth Sion, Darth Nihilus, or Darth Traya. If you're severely dark-sided, though, your character will be standing there instead.

iOS game Device6 uses this as its main draw, forcing you to turn the device as the character moves.

Metroid Prime actually has the player looking through Samus' helmet instead of just being a disembodied camera where her head should be like in many First-Person Shooter interfaces. Diegetic Interface aside, this also results in effects like the player being able to see Samus' reflection on the inside of her visor when something flashes nearby. The second game also has a mechanical enemy that can infect Samus' suit with a computer virus, one of the many ill effects including an intentionally choppy framerate.

While Comix Zone doesn't paint the medium in a video game sense, it does do so in a comic book sense. The main character is a writer trapped in his own comic while the comic's villain is transported to the real world and tries to kill him. Each level is laid out like a comic book page, with the protagonist jumping between panels, and ripping open pages can be done to do things like find hidden items or form giant paper airplanes to throw at your enemies. Meanwhile, the main villain is actually drawing enemies into each fight scene, and at one point actually sets fire to the page.

Done very subtly in Hearts of Iron III, where the nation selection screen has a map of the world with Axis members in a Germanic gothic font, Allies in a sans-serif, neutrals in a typewriter-style font, and Comintern members in Faux Cyrillic.

In the second game of the Mega Man Zero series, which takes place a year after the first ended with Zero stranded in a desert, the Start menu initially appears as a battle-damaged version of the Start menu from the first game. It is only after Zero is reunited with the Resistance that the menu design changes to the one used throughout the second game.

The Secret of Monkey Island had the memorable cutscene in which Guybrush is attempting to steal the Idol of Many Hands from the Governor's mansion, and a fight ensues between him and Fester Shinetop. Most of it takes place in another room that the camera doesn't cut to, so Guybrush's unshown actions are represented using the UI's command bar, with items appearing and disappearing from his inventory as appropriate. The result is much funnier than actually seeing what's going on would have been.

After the introduction of MIND: Path to Thalamus, the Player Character notes that he can't feel or see his actual body. Neither can the player, despite being able to interact with the world, but that was probably chalked up to standard video game conventions until it was pointed out.

At one point in the Imperial Agent storyline in Star Wars: The Old Republic, the player is brainwashed by Imperial Intelligence, rendering them unable to disobey any directive given with a specific code word. This is represented in conversations (which use the Mass Effect convention of tagging each dialogue option with a "paraphrase") that have different paraphrases, but the same actual line, as the Agent wants to disobey but isn't able to.

In the final battle in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, Kirby inhales so strongly that he inhales the boss's health bar along with everything else.

In Melty Blood, Sion's ability to partition her brain is represented by having a scene from her perspective with three dialogue windows covering different subjects. The text advances in one box at a time, and often will stop mid-sentence to jump to another one.

There are a pair of skeleton brothers named Papyrus and Sans. Papyrus has all his dialogue displayed in the Papyrus font, while Sans has all his dialogue in Comic Sans.

The game also contains a group of strange monsters called Temmies. Their text uses the same typeface as every other ordinary NPC, but it is filled with bizarre spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors. For example, instead of saying "Hi!", they greet you with "hOI!". And it only gets worse when they try to string together complex thoughts.

At the end of a No Mercy playthrough, the Fallen Child's destruction of the world is represented by a slashing attack animation covering the screen, followed by a wall of repeating 9's (implying an infinitely high amount of damage) as the game window shakes from side to side in the same way a slain monster does in-game.

The tutorial level in The Fairly Oddparents: Shadow Showdown is supposed to take place in an old fairy training film, and as such, everything (except the main trio) is colored in sepia tone, film grain and spots pop up all over the place, and even the music sounds as if it's coming from a phonograph.

How does Neko Atsume simulate the shyness of real-world cats, especially towards humans? The game only lets cats come to your yard while the app is closed.

Dying in League of Legends will cause your view to be displayed in black and white until you respawn.

In the Skullgirls Story Mode cutscenes, the presence of Double in the form of another character is sometimes represented by that character's name followed by a question mark at the top of their speech (eg 'Big Band?').

In Tyranny, green text in dialogue or a description usually indicates a tooltip describing something the Fatebinder should already know, but the player may not know or immediately recall. Bits of lore an educated person like the Fatebinder would have been taught, memories from before the game's start, and so forth. But there's two other uses:

General: A wave dash, the alien-to-English-punctuation tilde-like symbol is used in Japanese for things like "denoting semi-excited but not alarmed tone", "for cute or comic effect" at the end of sentences. Tildes or something of their likelihood can be seen retained in English text translations as well. Which preserves at the very least a degree of contrasts intended by the original.

In Ever17, the text box changes color depending on the current POV character — green for Takeshi, blue for the Kid, and gray for Blickwinkel himself.

Fate/stay night colours the screen red or fills the screen with static whenever the protagonist is badly wounded (or going through an epiphany). In the final route of the game, Heaven's Feel, the screen cracks whenever the protagonist uses his Deadly Upgrade which induces brain damage; the static becomes omnipresent, and certain words are whited out or simply not there, as he slowly loses his precious memories and ability to recall events, providing a chilling and saddening effect.

With Rewrite when Kotarou stops to let the player think about whether they want to hang out with Shizuru or not he lampshades the weight attached to really inconsequential seeming choices.

Kotarou: Incidentally, I always seem to think hard about little choices like this. Is that normal?

Later, when Shizuru makes Kotarou forget her name her name turns to ?? for a few lines.

The Terra route also does this when it locks in your choices so that you must follow the only path to saving humanity. Choices pop up all the time, but you can only pick one option.

In Little Busters!, there is a game mechanic where characters who lose fights with another character are given an Embarrassing Nickname, which shows up with fanfare on the screen. At the end of a fight this is normal, but at other points in the game when a character gives another a nickname (such as when Kurugaya calls Riki 'Boobs Demon' or when Kyousuke's Digging Yourself Deeper actions causes him to be branded a 'Lolicon Suspect') the same little textbox shows up. This carries on to the anime, too, where the game-like screen is even more out of place.

In Katawa Shoujo In Rin's route, there are a large number of confusing choices, hinting at the protagonist's inability to understand her.

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors splits the narration between character box dialogue and paragraphs of text up until the ending. Everything in the narration on the bottom screen of the DS is Akane in the past recounting what she sees through Junpei's eyes in the future. When the epilogue begins, Junpei and Akane's psychic link momentarily goes out of sync, cutting off Akane's In-Universe narration of her narration of Junpei's ordeals and instead describes what happened - from the first person - as she went through the Nonary Game. At the end, when the connection is re-established to the point where they can talk in real-time the narration is still not like what it had previously been since Akane is now safe and no longer needs to use it to survive.

Web Animation

On Homestar Runner, the Strong Bad Email "virus" involves computer viruses not only infecting Strong Bad's computer, but apparently the Flash file for the cartoon itself, as reality starts falling apart in strange, interesting, and funny ways. This also created a Main Page on the site based on the sbemail, though the "virus'd" components were just animations from scrolling over the buttons; the page is just as functional as the other Main Pages.

Bubs: My mouth was a broken jpeg!

Additionally, the site went down for a day or two, and they returned with an auto-loading animation featuring the same standard 404 page, and the characters walking on-screen to comment. "What happened to my website?"

A few weeks after Email number 99 was released, typing in the URL http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail100.html (which follows the same format as the previous 99 emails) brought you (and still does) to a similar "page could not be displayed" page where Strong Bad berates the user for being impatient. Supposedly, this page was created to trip up users trying to view the 100th Strong Bad Email before it was officially released.

Strong Bad: Teach you to poke around in my HTML...

Then the actual 100th Email itself plays with the fourth wall. Strong Bad says that this story must be shown "IN WIDESCREEN!" and the Flash window expands to do just that.

And Homestar himself appears behind the right side. He's pretty much always there, just usually he's Behind the Black.

Typing in an invalid URL on the site will bring up a "404'd" page in the style of Strong Bad's "Teen Girl Squad" comics. The title is a play on a Running Gag in Teen Girl Squad: injuries named with the object used to cause it, plus a "-'d" on the end (examples: MSG'd, team manager'd... Strong Bad even LampshadeHanging'd it once: "Those Teen Girl Squad girls are sure gonna get something'd now!") While this works with any URL that is not a valid file in the homestarrunner.com domain albeit not in a different directory (due to relative linking, pages such as this one will not load), the official URL is http://www.homestarrunner.com/404error.html.

In the 150th e-mail, "Alternate Universe", the style of talking changes depending on which universe Strong Bad is in at the moment. For example, in the Strong Badman comic, speech bubbles show up during speech, and in the storybook universe, everything anyone says is subtitled like a children's book.

Also in the Strong Badman comic, Strong Bad tells Strong Badman that his comic is getting boring, then jumped out of the panel and landed in a later one, thus basically gaining the power of time travel.

In Strong Sad's character introduction video, he is actually running his fingers through the side of the screen.

In The Order of the Stick a mysterious voice is found out to be evil because it speaks in red-and-black speech balloons.

Pretty much any kind of unusual or otherworldly speech pattern is conveyed by coloured text balloons. The lich Xykon's speech balloon is black with white font to get that "undead evil power reverb" feeling. Fiends and outsiders in general usually have coloured speech balloons that correspond to their primary colours. After a character makes a Deal with the Devil and gains evil power, their speech balloon turns black, with the secondary colour being the same as the colour of their magic.

A panel that emphasizes Roy's superfluousness to the Order's current dilemma has a speech bubble cover his body.

Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire has used sequences that break the comic strip, once to symbolize a breakdown of reality, other times of the mind. (The mouth-things and mosaics in the former are completely normal — the place depicted is weird.) More recently, as of this writing Dominic pulled a spell he'd been fighting with in his mind outside of his body, and for the next few days, has been fighting with it outside the boundaries of the panels.

In Achewood, Chucklebot (a robot, duh) speaks in a digital font. Blister, a ghost squirrel, speaks in unpunctuated block capitals. The most notable example, though, is Roast Beef, whose rambling speech is conveyed in a slightly smaller font with no commas.

Bob and George also uses this to lampshade, subvert, and Double SubvertContractual Immortality. The characters Bob and George can't die because their names are in the title of the comic. When the plot calls for their (temporary) death, the title of the comic temporarily changes in order to allow it to happen.

And when you have two parallel stories, running one on top and the other on the bottom, how do you find out what's happening in the top one from the bottom? Flight

In the V for Vendetta strip of Joe Loves Crappy Movies, Author Avatar Joe makes a snide comment about George W. Bush and is promptly taken into custody. He is then replaced by a government agent called George that replaces Joe for several strips, interacting with his friends and then girlfriend (now wife) Yeoh (who, strangely enough, are unfazed by this). Bringing this into Fourth Wall Painting territory is the fact that the strip's title changed to "George Loves Crappy Movies" and the movie reviews that accompanied each strip were made as if they were written by George (with his own Strawman Political bias).

Scenes set in the Ether are drawn more vibrantly, with no panel borders, and the art simply bleeds off the page. And on this page, Annie is in the Ether but interacting with the physical world; it's represented by her reaching into an inset panel. A god in the Ether is powerful enough to light up the panel borders.

After Rey's revelation in Chapter 31 that Annie indirectly caused Surmas's death., the panels and art become increasinglywavy to show Annie's fragile state of mind, which culminates in this page, in which Annie looses a wall of flame to cut off Eglamore as she runs across the bridge to Gillitie. The borders become warped and burnt, as if reacting to the fire.

After Antimony's traumatic meeting with her father, the art becomes sloppy and simplified during her Heroic B.S.O.D..

In the City Face filler pages, the Shout Box below the comic doesn't display reader comments—instead it shows comments from the Animated Actors involved in City Face, or other other characters in-story. These posts can no longer viewed in the comic archives, but they can be viewed here.

In 8-Bit Theater, after Thief's class change, he's seen in a red outfit for a few strips, then changes to black. When Black Mage asks him about it, he replies that his outfit was always black — and the red outfit in the archived strips was changed to match the "new" black one.

In addition, one of the many, many abilities of resident omnipotent jackass Sarda is a spell that lets the caster rewrite a person's speech bubbles to change what they just said to something Sarda finds more satisfactory. Something Sarda finds more satisfactory, as Black Mage finds out when he learns the spell and tries turning it on Sarda only to change the insulting remark Sarda just made to something more insulting.

In Lick My Jesus (which is, unfortunately, no longer accessible), one strip was based around the idea that different fonts were different languages. One character admitted, "I'm sorry... I don't speak Garamond."

Kinda like the old Brit ComAllo, Allo, in which different languages are represented by different accents — the Germans speak English with a German accent, the French speak English with a French accent, and so forth. One British character's "French" accent is very, very bad and leads to him saying things like "Gud moaning" rather than "Good morning".

In a similarly defunct example, This is, a webcomic presented as a series of brief, tongue-in-cheek descriptions, had as its 404 page a picture and brief, tongue-in-cheek description of a 404 page. Sadly, it has since been replaced by the 404 page from the author's subsequent project, which is significantly less meta about itself.

In Antihero for Hire, the eponymous Anti-Hero was kidnapped, resulting in an All Up to You situation. As a result, the comic's panel borders changed to white and pink, the rescuer's colors. Taken even further with green panels matching a comic relief character's scenes.

Schlock Mercenary used to use different fonts for the (English) speech of different races of beings in the galaxy. Humans "spoke" in a Courier-like font, the AI entity Petey spoke in a font that filled empty space inside of letters with a dot, and the F'sherl-Ganni aliens spoke in a very "pointy" font. The author phased out this practice due to the difficulty that fans had with reading these exotic fonts, but not without a fourth-wall-breaking strip to explain it. There are still a few holdouts, however - Ennesby and Schlock use different fonts from most other characters, since they use lowercase and most of the humans and other sophonts in the strip don't.

Another strip involved a character asking the narrator to move the narration box so she could see how bad a gunshot wound was on another character.

This page of Spanish webcomic ¡Eh, tío! allegedly depicts an epic zombie battle involving a ballpoint pen and two chickens — except that the image links for the middle six panels are deliberately broken. (Unfortunately Firefox 2 doesn't show that images are missing, so that part of the joke is lost to some.)

This page of the Spanish webcomic GeekInLove depicts the characters hunting a "archtypical" internet troll, but he is smarter than the main characters thought and he breaks the strip and goes down to the comments area to escape. He is still chased by one of the heroes, who finally kills him in the comment entry box. The "comment area" is in fact a mockup, but it's very well done and the comments are perfectly synchronized with the action.

Chapters 5-2 and 7 of City of Reality are brilliant examples. The introduction of the Choose Your Own Adventure Device in 5-2 is fairly straightforward, but you won't see the Chapter 7 example at all unless you read an offsite version of the chapter whose link is provided at the beginning.

This comic, by the author of City of Reality while not part of a continual series, is a wonderful, if creepy and somewhat depressing example of Painting The Medium.

Used occasionally in xkcd, such as in this strip, where speech balloons crossing the panel divisions are used to represent an interaction between present and future. Randall Munroe paints a nice Fourth Wall, and doesn't want to see it broken.

This strip of The Antagonist, where a counselor points out the eponymous ex-villain's, K's, specific speech, assuming the villain is immersed enough in the the act to be able to see his own word balloons, to which K answers, "This isn't a comic book."

Homestuck, like the other MS Paint Adventures stories, gives the readers the opportunity to influence what happens in the story by using the character specific suggestion boxes on the forums. However, after one character's house is hit by a meteor at the end of Act One, his suggestion box was locked, and replaced with a picture of a crater, until he was controllable again.

At the end of the fifth act, Doc Scratch takes over as a first-person narrator for a while. (All of the story up to this point has been in second person.) To make his text easier to read, he rewrites the site's CSS to have a green background. The top of the page is also replaced with a wide shot of his home (which actively changes as he and his guests move around in it.)

Space shots of the players' session shows the various planets (Skaia, Derse, Prospit, etc) with their orbits and neat descriptive labels. These appear to be more than mere subtitles, as a few shots show characters looking up from one planet or another at the giant 3-D letters hanging over their head. Given the nature of the game, it's entirely possible these labels really are there next to each planet.

During [S]: Cascade, one of Jack Noir's attacks rips the flash window larger. The effect is slightly less impressive on Newgrounds, because of their border.

There is also the practice of chat-users typing in their "quirks" (these quirks being different styles of typing; for example, Tavros rEVERSE CAPITALIZES while Vriska repl8es letters and sounds in phr8ses with 8s). While technically the quirks are literally being typed out by the trolls in their chat logs, they are still employed in their speech bubbles when they're portrayed talking face to face. The humans, trolls, and Cherubim are just speaking normally when they talk out loud; the quirks are only used to emphasize the differences in their mannerisms and personalities.

The Big Bad later changes the story's CSS in a similar manner to Doc Scratch, except instead of providing abridged narrations, he uses his narration to show his fan fiction. This later gets a flash sequence that switches between his location and the main story proper multiple times, and during that, everything (except for the dark green at the far ends of the page) flips around between the two layouts to show which part of the comic the flash is focused on.

In Zebra Girl, spiky speech bubbles signify that the speaker is a demon.

Girl Genius does this with speech balloons. Rectangles for machines, spikes for shouting, wavy edges for madness, dashes for whispers, icicles for hostility and icons for clank language. Afewexamples. Othar Trygvassen (Gentleman Adventurer!) uses a special font when announcing his name.

Flashbacks and memory recollections are denoted by sepia panel colours.

When Agatha's spark was supressed at the very beginning, the comic was coloured in harsh black and white. After the locket supressing it was stolen, colour began to return to the comic in decreasingly-washed-out shades until the comic was eventually in vibrant full colour.

The Fan WebcomicRoommates, and its Spin-OffGirls Next Door, does this a lot. Different characters' speech is written in different fonts, and various kinds of speech bubbles are used depending on character mood. (It's hardly possible but the Hungarian translation is actually worse in the weird font department... but it's consistent between the two, which the originals aren't.)

In The Mansion of E, each species has its own dialogue-font, and a few feature colored speech-balloons as well.

One story arc in Leftover Soup had Ellen and then Jamie being introduced to Lily's new RPG setting, Florenovia. Since they heard it said out loud and didn't know how it was spelled, their speech balloons also misspelled it based on their respective guesses until they'd seen it written down.

Erfworld, has some artifacts that are computer rendered instead of drawn like everything else. This is to demonstrate how otherworldly they are.

Goblins has the Axe of Prissan shattering, releasing the Demon Lord's influence on the surrounding world. As it progresses the panel borders go from plain white to a diseased green with peaks of a hellish glow starting to appear. Then the ichor leaking from the Axe gets on the frame and starts webbing across it, spreading from the edges to actually cross the panel itself.

Planets and dwarf planets not only can't understand each other, they can't even hear each other. This is represented by planets speaking in Speech Bubbles and dwarf planets in Thought Captions.

Black Hole, who uses telepathy, has dialogue that appears directly onto the page with no word bubbles around it, is very large, is shown in a pixelated font, and usually has some kind of glitch effect around it.

Ceres, who Came Back Wrong and who might now just be an Empty Shell under Black Hole's control, has their dialogue/thoughts appear the same way Pluto's do, but as a garbled jumble of letters overlaying each other so thick that they're impossible to read.

Open Blue has Kukulu, one of the Powers That Be, as an admin account made to smite God Modders and add unforseen elements to an RP thread. The account always posts with green text as opposed to the forum standard.

In the beginning of the eleventh episode of The Escapist's home webseries Apocalypse Arcade, the heroes meet a wizard who pretends he can stop time. After one of the heroes make a sigh of incredulity, the loading icon appears for a few seconds before being pushed aside by the incredulous protagonist.

The web story Ted the Caver is presented as a caving log with dated daily entries, and as the story continues it gets progressively weirder and scarier, ending with the protagonist acting oddly and against all logic planning another trip to the cave, but he promises several times that as soon as he returns, he'll write up everything that happened on his final journey. He states it won't be more than a few days. This is, of course, the last entry, dated sometime in 2001. Clicking on the link for "Next Entry" brings the reader to a 404 error. (The ending is told in the lack of an ending!)

Survival of the Fittest v4's Maria Graham does this at one point, starting with a flashback where she and another character are having a conversation, with their lines in blue and orange respectively to clarify who's saying what. After the flashback, Maria's still talking and thinking in blue text until she finally goes "Wait, why am I still thinking in blue?" and promptly stops.

Whenever some sad, sad person thinks they're being funny on a wiki or message board by using the tired joke of mentioning Candle Jack and then not

The "Pokemon Black" creepypasta was turned into a visual novel, playable on Nintendo DSes with homebrew-running devices. The last line is "GHOST cursed you, [DS owner]!"note It uses the name entered on the DS profile screen as the final word.

In the Speck arc of Worm, the narration begins to use a number of deliberate misspellings because Taylor is losing her ability to comprehend language.

The web novel Sailor Nothing is, of course, not content to mess only with genre and storytelling conventions. The color and font of headers reflects the mood of a particular section; Chapter 5 is split into four subpages, presented in a random order that changes on refreshing the page, each written in first person from a different character's perspective; Shin's journal entry uses a monospace font; the title for Cobalt's entry is the periodic table cell for cobalt; and Chapter 7 is rendered entirely as an Interactive Fiction game with sprites, although the author has provided a text-only "walkthrough FAQ" version. Even in the "normal" chapters, the narration switches between first person, third person, diary entries, et cetera. The little divider graphics between sections of a chapter contain one-liners if you squint just right.

SCP Foundation has a number of paranormal artifacts/creatures/etc which screw with the format of the articles written about them, and sometimes even modify the actual content of those articles. Generally anything with tag Meta is some kind of example of this.

Western Animation

The classic Looney Tunes short "Duck Amuck" is eight minutes of the animator screwing with Daffy Duck. Changing backgrounds, messing with sound effects, redrawing Daffy himself... even seemingly screwing with the film projector so that parts of two frames are on screen at once (prompting the two Daffys to confront each other).

This was remade as a game on the DS, with similar "painting," including Daffy "ripping up the game code".

Bugs Bunny has a similar episode, Rabbit Rampage by name, where Elmer Fudd is the artist. It's one of the very few times Bugs doesn't manage to pull a Karma Houdini. And that also had a video game remake.

It was also referenced on The Simpsons, when Homer badmouthed Matt Groening only to have a huge pencil eraser loom toward his head. The camera zooms out to reveal the pencil as a diegetic piece of an art installation that is on its way to being installated.

The Amazing World of Gumball makes extensive and heavy use of this. Simply the fact that most of the characters don't share the same art style does volumes to explain each character's personalities & attributes.

In "201", when Tom Cruise steals Muhammad's goo, a Censor Box appears over him just like Muhammad. When Stan makes a joke at his expense during the final battle, the box disappears.

Also in "201", there were two main plots; one was a political plot about censorship, the other was about finding Cartman's true father. Cartman and Kyle argue with each other about which is more important, then look straight at the camera.

The "Coon & Friends" arc initially got bad reviews after the first episode, in part because the boys (playing superheroes in silly outfits) couldn't be recognized due to the Only Six Faces art style. And then it turns out to be done on purpose, deconstructing the secret identity aspect of superhero stories, and the characters' identities are very slowly revealed throughout the episode trilogy. And then the story takes a few very dark turns once Mysterion's is revealed.

In the pilot episode of Wolverine and the X-Men, the ellipsis between the explosion that starts the main intrigue and the "present moment" was symbolised by a fake television signal disruption — as though Charles Xavier's huge psychic overdrive temporarily blew out your TV.

Family Guyonce had the usual promo for the Simpsons (8/7c) come on over the top of the regular cartoon, with Marge Simpson walking into frame. Suddenly, Quagmire walks into view and tackles her, ostensibly for sex. She fights him off, and he chases her around with his pants around his ankles. Eventually, she gives in, offscreen, and they both return to view and decide to head back to the Simpsons' for round two. The characters in the body of the cartoon actually stop talking to watch what's going on. The next scene is an exterior shot of the Simpson house. The audio indicates that Homer walks in on them, and gets shot by Quagmire in self-defense. Then he shoots Marge to keep her from calling the police. Then Bart walks in and gets shot. Then Lisa. He hesitates with Maggie. Then the show cuts right back to Family Guy like nothing ever happened.

In a later episode, an intrusive ad for 24(Mondays on Fox) appeared at the bottom of the screen, and Stewie stopped the action for quite a while to notice and complain about it.

Stewie: Oh- oh, I'm sorry, is my wedding interrupting your- your promotion? We're right in the middle of our show. Okay? Right now. You have a timeslot. Go there. Maybe finish this candy bar before you open another one.

Which kicked off a running joke in the same episode as fake live-action sitcom ads periodically showed up at the bottom of the screen, including "Shovin' Buddies" and "Slowly Rotating Black Man". The characters reacted to them each time.

Lois: Is that even a real show?

Stewie: No, no, someone's playing a joke on you.

After Stewie's time machine rips a hole in the fabric of the universe and leaves Brian and Stewie floating in an endless void, a generic ClevelandShow ad pops up, commented on by Stewie.

In yet another episode: Stewie makes a reference to the "wonderful decisions" made by Fox executives, and as he's finishing up his seemingly sincere statement, an ad for Sons Of Tuscon appears on the bottom of the screen. SoT had been canceled halfway through its season; Stewie then has a tired/disgusted look on his face as he turns to the camera, "let's all remember, that this, was a thing."

Speaking of Sons of Tucson, in the American Dad!! episode "Jenny Fromdabloc," Roger has a stress ball that he uses for....other purposes, and at one point he picked it up and noticed it was advertising Sons of Tucson, to which Roger remarks, "What is this? I watch Fox, I've never heard of this."

The Tex Avery cartoon Magical Maestro includes a gag where it appears that a hair has gotten caught in the movie-projector showing the cartoon, only to have a character pause midaction, pluck the "hair" and toss it away.

This cartoon was eventually shipped with a big red warning sticker so projectionists wouldn't be driven crazy trying to eliminate the hair.

Several of Avery's cartoons feature similar gags; in "Dumb-Hounded" the Wolf runs around a corner so quickly that he swerves off the film and back, and in "Lucky Ducky", George and Junior stray past a sign reading "Technicolor Ends Here" and find that their surroundings have changed from color to monochrome.

Another on-screen hair sneaks up in the Warners short "Aviation Vacation", bobbing around while an Irish tenor is singing. After a minute he stops and yells at the (presumed) projectionist to "Get that hair out of here!"

In one episode of the animated series of Men in Black, in a scene where the heroes discuss how to vanquish the powered-with-sound Monster of The Day, the sound seems to suddenly have a bug until the surprised expression of the character realizing that a weapon is being tested on them.

In The Adventures of Mark Twain, a claymation feature film, God reaches out from the heavens to nudge a sleeping Adam awake. Adam is a claymation figure, the hand of God is a live-action human hand.

In a similar vein, God in The Simpsons has four fingers and a thumb on each hand.

Any computer or conventional animation that adds "Lens Flare" from the sun or a bright light source is painting the fourth wall, but to make it seem more realistic, as if a physical camera lens was used to record an actual scene.

Firefly goes even further, having shot where the camera zooms in on a spacecraft, but then needs to move the ship back into shot and refocus. It's all an effects sequence, so all this takes extra effort to seem more real.

Battlestar Galactica (2003) did this along with steadicam effects. In one case, a bit of shrapnel hits the "camera" with an audible thunk and sends it flying, as though the camera had really been floating in space.

As the world falls into chaos in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "The Return of Harmony: Part 2", a pony is shown running along the top and left edges of the screen.

Some of the Japanese fansubs will have stressed words suddenly grow big, and certain lines following the speaker.

In "Lesson Zero", when Twilight has her minor breakdowns, Spike snaps her out of it by physically changing the shot by shoving the backdrop out of the way or using his claw to pop the thought bubble containing Twilight's Imagine Spot. Not to mention the sun and windmill moving like clock hands, representing Twilight's looming deadline.

The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol plays with the animation medium interestingly: the present and future scenes are done with CGI resembling the feature films, while the past scenes are traditionally animated.

Real Life

Universal Studios' The Incredible Hulkroller coaster suddenly hurls the passengers forward during the climb up the first hill, right when the audio says the experiment they're listening to goes wrong. The engineer says this represents the sudden surge of uncontrollable power experienced by Bruce Banner upon turning into the Hulk.

On many websites, including this wiki, some posters seem use spoiler tags for hiding words that should not be said, written, or seen for some superstitious reason, such as the Tetragrammaton, or the name of The Scottish Play, or less seriously, a potentially Flame War fueling forum post, as if the whiteness would make them partially unwritten.

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